John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Not only were nature and the environment identical on both sides of the border, so were the people themselves. In the mid-nineteenth century, Canadians and Americans were almost exactly the same people: both were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, except for the large number of black slaves in the United States. They were not just the same people but were often of the same families. Few Canadian families did not have a relative south of the border (in Macdonald’s own case, his cousin Margaret Greene). Many, including many Canadiens, had lost a son or nephew or cousin to migration across the border in search of a better job; in reverse, most of the Loyalists and the American settlers had left kin behind. Most Canadians, therefore, for all their protestations of loyalty to the Queen and genuine belief in the superiority of British law and British politics, were perfectly well aware that the United States was incomparably richer, more advanced and developed, possessed a far superior education system (Harvard University dated back to 1636), and boasted grander buildings, roads, canals, railways.

  To gain all the abundant benefits of being American, Canadians then needed to do little more than to declare collectively, “We want in.” Britain wouldn’t have stood in their way, its leaders having declared repeatedly that they would accept Canadians’ choice of independence. The succeeding step would have been, sooner or later, that of a “ripe fruit” dropping, passively and effortlessly, into the Union. But it never happened.

  Macdonald did stand in the way. He possessed an instinctual understanding that the choice would be determined by passion, not by reason. That was why he so often escalated the emotional content of the public debate on the subject by accusing opponents not just of being wrong but of “treason” and even of “veiled treason”—this phrase being almost his trademark, although in fact its actual author was Disraeli. In the early 1860s, though, Macdonald was only the latest in a line of leaders, rather than the iconic, national leader he would become. The X factors that decided the issue were Canadians’ certitude of moral superiority and, as much, their certitude that British was best. These attitudes did stand in the way of annexation; neither of them, though, could have stopped an army.

  Describing Macdonald as an anti-American, although it evokes a contemporary echo, doesn’t position him properly. Ultimately, the United States was simply irrelevant to him, except on the occasions when it specifically threatened Canada. In the huge library that he eventually accumulated at Earnscliffe, his home in Ottawa, there were almost no American books. Except for his early sorties to Upper New York State, he always holidayed in Rivière-du-Loup, or in Prince Edward Island, or in England. During all his post-Confederation years as prime minister, he went only once to Washington on government business, and to no other city. He met only one president, Ulysses S. Grant, by accident at a reception. He took no interest in U.S. politics. He never showed any understanding that one reason many Americans favoured annexation was far less expansion for its own sake—although obviously an imperative—than that they believed, genuinely, that Canadians would be better off once Americans; Richard Cartwright, in his Reminiscences, was much closer to the mark when he observed that Americans “have always found it very hard to believe that we honestly preferred our own institutions to theirs.” As well, Macdonald was oddly unwilling to accept the legitimacy of, and most certainly the consequences of, American anger with Britain (and by extension with Canada) for the way that, during the Civil War, Confederate commerce raiders were allowed to be built under contract in British yards and then cross the Atlantic to sink Federal merchant ships. To Macdonald, the United States was a terra incognita about which he had no desire, and felt no need, to learn anything.

  Rejecting the United States didn’t make him British. It made him a British-American, at a time when the descriptor “Canadian” was seldom used—other than by Canadiens. It made him, in other words, wholly British and at the same time wholly North American. While Macdonald went often to England, he never considered moving there, as many Canadians like him did, once they had retired—including the two first presidents of the Canadian Pacific Railway, George Stephen and Donald Smith; his political rival of the 1870s and 80s, Edward Blake; and, in his plans for the future, his own close ally Cartier. To them and to many other Canadians for quite a while yet, Britain was “home.” To Macdonald, although he loved to visit London, Canada was home.

  For Canada to remain his home, it had to remain British. Had Canada ever become American during his time, it’s just about certain that Macdonald would have left for the other side of the Atlantic.

  The leitmotif of Macdonald’s career and life was to preserve Canada’s un-Americanness. To him, the perpetuation of its Britishness was essential to that cause. So too would be the Confederation project. The handily available tool he used to lever himself towards both these objectives was anti-Americanism.

  That most Canadians thought the same way made his task that much easier—up to a point. Being Canadians, the fact that they overwhelmingly rejected the United States didn’t prevent huge numbers of them from voting for it with their feet. By the end of the nineteenth century, one in five Canadians would be living in the United States.*94

  Besides stirring up the underlying anti-Americanism, the Trent crisis stimulated a pan-Canadian consciousness. Nova Scotia was then a separate colony, and especially emotionally close to Britain, because it was protected by the Royal Navy. Yet in the winter of 1861–62, Nova Scotians enlisted in their militia in proportionately greater numbers than did Canadians. The crisis also prompted the first serious debates about a long-discussed railway—the Intercolonial—to connect the Maritimes to inland Canada. (These discussions had been going on, entirely fruitlessly, since 1851.) The railway’s justification was that it could be used to rush British reinforcements to Canada in winter rather than have them plod through the backwoods.*95 The Imperial government now began to consider the possibility of guaranteeing the loans needed to build a railway that in itself would be uneconomic. The crisis marked the first instance of all British North Americans reaching out to each other.

  It was Macdonald himself who helped abort this nascent pan-Canadianness. He did so by botching a piece of major legislation and then seeming not to care about the consequences—one of which was the defeat of his own government.

  The previous March, the commission on defence that he had set up and chaired handed in its report. The findings were startling: there should be “an active force of 50,000 men of all arms, with a reserve of the same kind.” This goal was extraordinarily ambitious. More startling still, the commission recommended that if voluntary enlistments proved insufficient, conscription should be instituted. During the Trent crisis, that might have been acceptable. But with that alarm well past, everyone, Macdonald included, took it for granted that Canada was secure until at least the Civil War was over.

  Macdonald drafted legislation to implement his commission’s recommendations. In the House, though, he came across as confused, at times offering different estimates of the costs. The best estimate amounted to a staggering one-tenth of Canada’s entire revenues. To make these costs even more unacceptable, Macdonald was, at the same time, having to explain a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar overrun in the cost of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

  His defeat was determined by his own bleu supporters, many of whom bolted rather than share ownership of a measure that might result in conscription, however limited in its extent. The vote was held on May 20, 1862, and the Militia Bill was defeated 61 to 54. A day later, Macdonald and Cartier resigned. He “took the matter very quietly,” reported Edward Watkin, general manager of the Grand Trunk Railway, who knew him well. “I am at last free, thank God, and can now feel as a free man,” Macdonald wrote to his sister Margaret. “I have longed for this hour & only a sense of honour has kept me chained to my post…I have now fulfilled my duty to my part & can begin to think of myself.” After Macdonald had stepped down, the governor general invited his namesake, John Sandfield Macdonald, a Reformer, to form a new gove
rnment.

  One good reason existed why defeat was the best possible outcome for Macdonald at this time. In the middle of the debate on his Militia Bill, the Globe had broken one of the unwritten rules of nineteenth-century journalism by informing its readers on May 15 that Macdonald “has had one of his old attacks.”*96 The newspaper was entirely correct. Claiming illness, Macdonald was absent from the legislature for more than one week of the debate on his Militia Bill, and Galt had to substitute for him.

  The Globe’s use of the phrase “old attacks” signalled its readers that Macdonald had been in the same condition—drunk, that is—before. A few days later, the paper renewed the attack: “It must be confessed that Mr. Macdonald’s ‘illnesses’ occur at very convenient times.” At the same time, Governor General Monck, in a confidential dispatch home, did his duty and informed the colonial secretary that Macdonald had been absent from the House for an entire week during the critical militia debate, “nominally by illness, but really, as everyone knows, by drunkenness.”

  There had in fact been quite a few earlier “attacks.” The previous April, Macdonald had a heated exchange with a leading Reformer, Oliver Mowat, in the House in which he had threatened to “slap your chops.” That fall, a visiting Englishwoman who met him at a dinner party at the governor general’s residence, wrote afterwards, “The cleverest man of the lot, distinguished himself by getting completely drunk.” After the Globe’s reports, Macdonald’s secret was known not merely to insiders but to just about everyone in the colony.

  Macdonald’s “vice,” as it was called then, has become since one of the best-known facts about him, almost as well known as his role in Confederation or his achievement in spanning the country with a railway. It’s time to hold up this particular aspect of his life story to closer inspection.

  The first recorded instance of Macdonald’s drinking to excess occurred back in 1839 when a legal client and relative, Alan Macpherson, left a note on his door: “I called at your office twice on Tuesday but could not gain admittance. I suppose you were doing penance for the deeds of the previous day.” That incident was nothing but a young man’s boisterousness. During the years since, however, Macdonald had gained a reputation as one of the legislature’s most convivial members, staying up as late as anyone in the Smoking Room and topping all of them with his repartee and anecdotes—and by his taste for champagne.

  Macdonald’s loss of control during the critical Militia Bill was quite different: it provoked, as Macdonald had to have known it would, highly critical comments from senior British ministers as well as a blistering editorial from the influential Times (London): “If Canada will not fight to protect its independence, neither will England…. If they are to be defended at all, they must make up their minds to bear the greater part of the burden of their own defence. This will be the case if they separate from us. This will be the case if they remain by us.” The difference, very simply, was that Macdonald had by now really lost control over his drinking.

  Both friends and enemies identified the same period as the time his behaviour changed—the time when it had become obvious that Isabella would never recover and that he was condemned, whether she lived or died, to bleak solitude. His secretary, Joseph Pope, wrote in his biography that Macdonald’s lapses were “particularly true for the period of his widowerhood, between 1857 and 1867.” Richard Cartwright, originally a Conservative and later a Liberal minister, wrote in his memoir that Macdonald was “leading a very dissipated life from 1856 to 1863, and afterwards.”

  Isabella’s illness and death didn’t cause his drinking; her condition intensified a pre-existing inclination. From Macdonald’s earliest years, it was always probable that he would drink a lot. His father did. So did many Scots, and many politicians. George-Étienne Cartier was a heavy drinker, and D’Arcy McGee drank even more than Macdonald. The behaviour of these men, and a great many others like them in all occupations in Canada, was in no way out of the ordinary.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, drinking heavily was as common in Canada as smoking would be in the middle of the twentieth century. An 1842 municipal survey in Kingston counted 136 taverns for a population of fewer than five thousand people. In his 1846 book Canada and the Canadians, Richard Bonnycastle described Canada as “a fine place for drunkards; it is their paradise.” Rotgut whisky cost 25 cents a gallon; in many houses a pail of whisky stood handy in the kitchen, much like a pail of water, for any visitor to ladle out however much he wanted At the end of a ride in a horse-drawn cab, it was common to “treat” the driver with a shot of whisky—a substitute for today’s practice of tipping, which didn’t then exist. At elections times, “treating” was a near-universal practice.

  Few social sanctions existed to inhibit anyone from drinking heavily in public. As Susanna Moodie noted in Life in the Clearings, “Professional men were not ashamed to be seen coming from the bar-room of a tavern early in the morning.” Her sister, Catharine Parr Traill, observed that heavy drinking was more prevalent among the “better classes” than among ordinary people. Drinking didn’t mean then, as in today’s “social drinking,” a few glasses of wine spaced out over an evening; it meant getting totally, stupidly, drunk. Being an important public figure was no bar to getting inebriated in public. Indeed, of the U.S. presidents who were Macdonald’s contemporaries, two, Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant, were well known as drunkards. Formal occasions provided no restrictions. The senior civil servant Edmund Meredith recorded in his diary, “Captain Sparks was hopelessly drunk while escorting the Governor General to the House: he fell off his horse while essaying to draw his sword.” Lady Monck, the wife of the governor general at the time of Confederation, wrote home about a cousin having his coattails “nearly torn off” at a grand ball in Quebec City and reporting, “such drunkenness, pushing, kicking and tearing he says he never saw.”*97

  As for Macdonald’s own lack of inhibition about getting drunk on the most inappropriate occasions, he once got blind drunk while waiting for one newly arrived governor general’s ship to dock, and an another occasion told the aide to another governor general sent to check on his prolonged absence from official duties either to “go to hell” himself or to tell the Queen’s representative to go there.

  At the time that Macdonald’s “vice” became general public knowledge, the only real alternative to heavy drinking was total abstinence. Temperance organizations—the leading one, based in the United States, was the Order of the Sons of Temperance—lobbied fiercely against any drinking at all. Their crusade was justified: a Legislative Assembly committee reported, “One-half of all the crime committed…three-fourths of all the pauperism, are ascribable to intemperance.” So, of course, was a great deal of the domestic violence and family breakdown.

  It needs to be remembered here that the Victorian Age, in the sense we now use that term—repressed, dark, overstuffed—didn’t spring into existence in 1837 when the young Victoria ascended to the throne. Much as the 1960s’ “Peace and Love” era didn’t really get going until the middle of that decade, the Victorian Age really only took hold around the 1870s. Over time, Macdonald fell behind the times. When he started out, though, his behaviour was closer to that of the preceding Regency era—incomparably freer in all respects. Lord Kimberly, the colonial secretary, was undoubtedly thinking of this time lag when he remarked of Macdonald, “He should have been in the good old times of two bottle men, when one of the duties of the Secretary of the Treasury is said to have been to hold his hat on occasion of the First Lord when ‘clearing himself’ for his speech.”

  But while Macdonald, for a time, was one of the crowd, he was always one of a kind. He was always a public drunk, in that term’s exact sense. Macdonald’s manner of drinking was unique to him. Increasingly, from his widowerhood on, it became uninhibited, ugly, out of control. The decisive change was in his openness. Henceforward, Macdonald would get drunk on the most public and the most important occasions without any apology or self-consciousness or
shame. It became as much a defining fact about him as his crinkly hair or his inexhaustible wiliness. From this time on, and for quite a time, heavy drinking was Macdonald.

  He never made the least attempt to hide his drinking—unlike, say, his contemporary William Gladstone, with his sallies across London to save prostitutes, or Mackenzie King, with his crystal-ball gazing. Not only was Macdonald entirely unashamed about his behaviour but he actually drew attention to it. Once, when a heckler at a public meeting accused him of being drunk, he responded, “Yes, but the people would prefer John A. drunk to George Brown sober.” And indeed they did. They applauded his deft recovery from throwing up on the platform at an all-candidates’ meeting by saying, “Mr. Chairman, I don’t know how it is but every time I hear Mr. X speak, it turns my stomach.” There was no hypocrisy in Macdonald’s makeup, and no fear.

  Macdonald wasn’t so much a heavy drinker as a binge drinker; he could go for long periods without a drop. Once he had started, though, it often took complete insensibility for him to stop. A common trigger for this kind of “tear” was some combination of pressure and tiredness; actual political setbacks or disappointments, though, appeared to have little effect on him. Macdonald thus didn’t so much drink to relieve a fear of failing but more to relieve the tensions generated by his attempts to succeed. The best single comment about the nature of his drinking was made by the visiting governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Sir Henry Northcote, who recorded in his diary, “People do not attribute his drinking to vice, but to a state of physical exhaustion which renders him obliged sometimes to have recourse to a stimulant, and which gives the stimulant a very powerful effect. When he once begins to drink he becomes almost mad and there is no restraining him till the fit is over.”