Here is as good a place as any to clarify the record that although he was a Scot, Macdonald’s favourite choice for something that would get him drunk was not Scotch, except in his earliest years, but champagne, claret, port and brandy.
As soon as Macdonald stepped down, Canadian newspapers speculated eagerly that he might carry right on and leave politics entirely. The easiest of all outs for him appeared just at this time, when the positions of chief justice and chancellor of Upper Canada fell vacant. Yet Macdonald refused them both. In a revealing letter to a supporter, he explained why he’d stepped down so quickly as premier rather than attempt some variation on his old double-shuffle escapade: by stepping down, he wrote, “we have shown that we do not wish to cling to office for its own sake.” He wanted to make an elegant exit, that is to say, to make it easier for himself to slide right back in again.
That fall, Macdonald took ship to England, for the first time in twelve years. He was made an honorary member of the Athenaeum Club, met with the colonial secretary and the Duke of Newcastle, and was generally favoured and petted. In February 1863 he was back again in Canada, “in very good health and spirits, and eager for the fray.” So eager indeed was Macdonald that year that he went to the extreme limit of joining the Sons of Temperance in Kingston. It probably won him some votes but had no discernible effect on his drinking.
SIXTEEN
The Will to Survive
For the sake of securing peace to ourselves and our posterity, we must make ourselves powerful. The great security for peace is to convince the world of our strength by being united. John A. Macdonald
After his return from England in February 1863, Macdonald set to work to ease his namesake out of office and return himself to the premiership. The deed was done just over a year later: on March 21, 1864, John Sandfield Macdonald resigned in advance of certain defeat on a non-confidence vote. The intervening months were probably the least useful of any in the United Province of Canada’s parliamentary history: no legislation of consequence was passed; a second attempt to enact a Militia Bill failed; Canadien members became more and more suspicious that Rep by Pop was going to be imposed on them no matter what they did; and an election in mid-1863 changed nothing at all—Cartier won back some of the bleus he had lost in 1861, but Macdonald was reduced to just twenty supporters in Upper Canada, in large part because of suspicions he was “soft” on the French.
In an attempt to avoid yet another election, Governor General Monck invited in succession two senior legislature members to try to form a government. Both reported failure. Next he turned to Macdonald, who approached his former co-premier, Étienne-Paschal Taché. Between the two of them they cobbled together a bare majority in the legislature. Two months later, the Taché-Macdonald alliance lost a confidence vote. Another election was unavoidable.
Within the space of less than three years, there had now been four governments and two inconclusive elections, with a third one due. Canada’s political system had degenerated into paralytic deadlock.
Amid the gathering gloom there were a few points of light. One was that Macdonald’s old opponent George Brown had got married—at the mature age of forty-three. His bride, Anne Nelson, the daughter of an Edinburgh publisher, was a woman of substance. They met when he had gone north to Scotland during a trip late in 1862. Anne was intelligent, sophisticated, well travelled (she was fluent in French and had studied in Germany), calm and confident, and the marriage proved to be one of unalloyed love. When ever he was away from home, Brown wrote to Anne almost every day—and repeatedly with unabashed affection. “Already I long to be back with you,” he penned on one occasion, “and will grudge every day I am kept from your side.” In the winter of 1863, when Anne informed him she was pregnant, Brown pronounced himself as “frisky as a young kitten.”
Anne Nelson Brown. After he married her, Brown turned into a moderate. Had she been around earlier, he might have won his contest with Macdonald.
Brown got himself back into politics at a by-election early in March 1863 and soon re-established himself as the leader of the Reformers. His former angry moralism had mellowed. Phrases such as “French domination” dropped from his speeches, to be replaced by softer musings about the need for “constitutional reform.” Brown’s biographer, J.M.S. Careless, described Anne Brown as “the Mother of Confederation,”*98 meaning that she so influenced Brown to view the world more even-handedly that, provided some nation-saving crusade was at stake, it actually became possible that he and Macdonald might be able to work together in a partnership—temporarily. At the time, Brown’s most important political supporter and ally, Oliver Mowat, wrote that under Anne’s influence, “the softer side of his nature has been developed.” To Brown, she was “the best wife that ever lived.” No story is ever perfect. While she may have been Confederation’s mother, Anne disliked the child itself. “You must never speak of settling down here for life,” she wrote to Brown, “The idea of being buried here is dreadful to me.” (After Brown’s early death, Anne moved back to Scotland.)
Brown’s new attitude of moderation showed that some movement had begun beneath the hardened crust of Canadian politics. Macdonald made two attempts to find out what Brown was up to, one with the assistance of a Liberal-Conservative member who had connections to both camps, and the other by making use of Charles Brydges, the new general manager of the Grand Trunk Railway. In his meeting with Brown, Brydges offered him the bait of the chair of the Canada Board of the Hudson’s Bay Company, stirring up some interest in Brown. The reports of both intermediaries suggested that Brown was looking for what Brydges called an “omnibus arrangement,” or some kind of comprehensive new political rearrangement. By no means, though, had he lost his suspicions of his old rival. During the 1863 session, Brown got off a splendid shot at Macdonald, calling him a “grimalkin” crouched “at the door of the pantry, watching for mice to come in and out.”
Movement had begun elsewhere as well. By now, Macdonald and McGee were allies. In a key by-election early in 1863, they campaigned and caroused together; one of the songs they bawled out in taverns went, “A drunken man is a terrible curse / But a drunken woman is twice as worse.” The Conservative candidate won handily. McGee brought Macdonald a lot of Catholic Irish votes; he also brought with him his passion for Confederation. In a series of articles that summer, McGee put forward his argument for a “new nationality.” Later he toured the Maritimes—the first Canadian politician to do so—to tell audiences in Halifax and Saint John about “the fortunate genius of a united British America.” When Macdonald formed his March 1864 government with Taché, McGee became its minister of agriculture.
The most significant change in the Canadian political scene took place in the early summer of 1863, but outside the country. That June, General Robert E. Lee followed up a sweeping victory at Fredericksburg, Virginia, by sending the seventy-five-thousand-strong Army of Northern Virginia swinging up into the Shenandoah Valley. At the hamlet of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lees’ troops met the ninety-thousand-strong Army of the Potomac. The two vast forces clashed on July 1. Two days later, Lee turned his shattered army back towards Virginia, followed almost immediately by the surrender of Vicksburg, the last Confederate fort on the Mississippi. The Confederacy was now cut in two. Gallantry and dash could no longer overcome numbers and industrial productivity. The South hung on, despite Lincoln’s expectations of its collapse, but the war’s eventual outcome could no longer be doubted. Once that happened, the question would then become, what would happen to Canada?
During the months after Gettysburg, Macdonald plotted his way through all the post–Civil War possibilities. They encompassed everything from an actual cross-border invasion, to nothing happening at all but with the U.S. colossus completely overshadowing the small and poor Province of Canada, to Britain reassessing its position on the North American continent and withdrawing its troops. The Times (London) commented, perceptively but embarrassingly, that the redcoats stationed in Canada were “
numerous enough to irritate but not numerous enough to intimidate or to defend.” Macdonald revealed the product of his ponderings in a remarkable speech—more exactly, a remarkable portion of a speech dealing mostly with other matters—that he gave in the fall of 1864, a year and a bit after Gettysburg.
To describe the key section of this speech here involves fast-forwarding past a cluster of political events in which Macdonald played a critical part, and afterwards winding back to recapture the skipped-over parts. This, though, is the only way to make sense of the sequence of events and to understand why Macdonald should have abruptly abandoned his long indifference to Confederation and then gone on to become first its main cheerleader and then its impresario.
The date of this speech was Tuesday, October 11, 1864. By then, the Confederation process was already well under way. Macdonald spoke at the start of a conference in Quebec City at which delegates from all the colonies of British North America debated whether to create a new, pan-Canadian government and how best to do it. Macdonald used part of his speech to explain why success at the conference mattered so much. The issue, he argued, was not a new constitution, important and indeed essential as that obviously was. Rather, it was Canada’s survival. Macdonald was expressing here the leitmotif of his life—to ensure that Canada did not become American.
From Macdonald’s perspective, Confederation and the new constitution that would go with it were means to an end. That end was Canada’s survival as a distinct, un-American society in North America. To remain distinct, Canada had to remain British. To keep the British connection, Canada had to impress a doubting Britain by an expression of its national will to survive. And the way to do that was Confederation, because it involved a commitment to national unity across British North America on a scale never before attempted.
In trying to communicate such thoughts to an audience, Macdonald was hobbled by his customary and considerable handicap. As a debater, he was quick, skilled and often lethal; as a speaker, though, he was little better than average. He had little aptitude for, and was actually suspicious of, oratory or eloquence. Unlike Lincoln, he never attempted to summon up “men’s better angels.” Most times, Macdonald preferred to act rather than talk, expressing himself by deeds rather than by words. He did, however, possess one highly effective oratorical device: every now and then he would use candour to get people to pay attention. This device sent out a signal that whatever he was saying, he actually meant. So people listened.
“It is stated [by some opponents of Confederation], that in England…federalism will be considered as showing a desire for independence,” Macdonald began this part of his speech at the conference. He himself didn’t believe that, he continued, but rather that “the people of England are strongly bent on keeping her position as a mighty empire, which can only be done by helping her colonies.” Yet, he admitted, “the value of the colonies has never been fairly represented to the people of England.” He cited some of the important British figures who publicly questioned the worth of the colonies—for instance, the influential journalist Goldwin Smith, then still a professor at Oxford. Many of the delegates, few of whom ever looked much beyond their own county or town, would have been surprised and shocked to hear their most senior politician admit openly that doubts existed in high places in England about the value of holding on to Canada. Macdonald hammered home his point: “Our present isolated and defenceless position is, no doubt, a source of embarrassment to England.” He speculated that “if it were not for the weakness of Canada, Great Britain might have joined France in acknowledging the Southern Confederacy.”
Having identified the problem—Canada’s weakness might motivate England to pull back from North America—Macdonald then presented his solution: “We must, therefore, become important, not only to England but in the eyes of foreign states. And most especially to the United States…. For the sake of securing peace to ourselves and our posterity, we must make ourselves powerful. The great security for peace is to convince the world of our strength by being united.”
Macdonald was using these passages in his speech to appeal to Canadians to send out a clear, collective signal of their will to survive. Doing this—by Confederation—would give a message that would be noticed and respected in the two places that mattered to Canada—London and Washington.
What Macdonald was telling the delegates in Quebec City was, as most of them must have recognized, the truth itself, harsh and unvarnished. U.S. power was the new continental reality. Britain could still help and would continue to do so, but increasingly from a distance. Ultimately, Canada was on its own. Either it made a convulsive effort to survive or it just might vanish.
When and how Macdonald underwent such a eureka moment has to remain a mystery—indeed, no proof exists that he ever experienced it. He left no writing describing it; no colleague ever claimed later to have been there when he blurted out, “Now I see!” Intellectual epiphanies were not, anyway, his style; Macdonald favoured action, not angst. And to him action included the seeming inaction of waiting for the exact moment when all the stars were aligned. That Macdonald eventually committed himself to Confederation at about five minutes to midnight doesn’t mean that he had not recognized its necessity a good deal earlier. What mattered is that, once he had intuited that the moment was ripe, Macdonald hurled himself into action, never again glancing back. We were made, this is to say, by a man who, once he knew what do to, knew how to get it done.
Other commentators have argued for different interpretations of the sequence of events. To some, Donald Creighton above all, Macdonald moved stealthily towards Confederation for years before he committed himself to it publicly. The predominant view is that he took up Confederation’s cause only when he realized that unless he joined the project he would put at risk his own and his party’s future. That interpretation is, of course, far from being wholly wrong. But it amounts to a one-dimensional analysis of a leader with a multilayered mind—something akin to treating as the complete Lincoln the very limited leader that Lincoln amounted to at the start of the American Civil War.
That speech by Macdonald at Quebec City was the first time Canada’s politicians had been told the truth about the “double” threat that Canada faced from across the Atlantic and from across the border. It’s uncertain how many of his contemporaries understood what Macdonald was attempting to do. Galt did, as a later letter of his will show. And so did Goldwin Smith, who at the time wrote that the only way to defend Canada was “to fence her round with the majesty of an independent nation.” What was happening, though, was that the Confederation stakes were being transformed from merely those of finding a way to end a political deadlock to that of finding a way for Canada to survive.
That Britain might, if not actually abandon Canada, then gently but firmly pull itself back from a close embrace in order to position itself nearer to the United States, challenges the generally presented view of Canada as the nineteenth-century linchpin of the British Empire. After all, without Canada, the Empire would no longer stretch around the world in an unbroken chain on which the sun never set. At the time, though, such a gap would not have mattered that much—simply because the Empire did not matter that much to the British themselves.
The British Empire of the mid-1860s was not at all the Empire of bugles and banners and thin red lines that has been handed down in the history books. These flummeries existed then, but the Empire itself did not really exist. It did physically, of course. Britain was the global hegemon: it accounted for one-third of the world’s industrial output; its Royal Navy policed the seas; and London was easily the world’s largest and richest city. Moreover, the British Empire possessed the aura of having defeated Napoleon (a glory now fading fast) and the moral aura of having deployed the Royal Navy to sweep slavery from the high seas.*99
But it didn’t exist psychically. Rather than an empire, what Britain owned then was an agglomeration of territories acquired or conquered or bought or swapped or stolen “in a fit of abs
ence of mind,” to use the famous phrase.*100 The British Empire, in the term’s ordinary meaning—the one it took Canada until the Statute of Westminster of 1931 to gain full independence from—didn’t come into being until the 1870s. Its birth is commonly dated to Disraeli’s purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, although a better date might be 1872, when Disraeli turned imperialism into Britain’s political litmus test—and not coincidentally won power for himself—by attacking the Liberals, and his arch-rival Gladstone, for seeking “the disintegration of the Empire of England.”†101
Before this time, the British were quite uncertain whether they wanted to have an empire. The country was divided between “Big Englanders” like Disraeli and “Little Englanders,” who reckoned that any empire imposed far greater costs on Britain than benefits. Intellectually, the Little Englanders made all the running; they won a key argument over free trade in the 1840s, after which Britain’s trade no longer followed the flag but chased after profits anywhere. Disraeli himself spoke at times in the tones of a Little Englander; in 1852 he described the colonies as “a millstone around our necks.” As late as 1866 he reasoned from the emergence of a united Germany and a rising Russia that “power and influence we should exercise in Asia, consequently in Eastern Europe, consequently in Western Europe; but what is the use of these colonial deadweights which we do not govern?”(The peak of the Little Englanders came in 1868–72, when such views were held not just by Gladstone, then the prime minister, but also by his chancellor of the Exchequer, the foreign secretary and the colonial secretary.)
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