John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Howe’s interventions made a difference. But the prime source of Maritimers’ hostility to Confederation was something quite different and almost unresolvable. This was that they were so distant from Canada and so near, relatively, to Britain. In his speech in Halifax after the Charlottetown Conference, Macdonald had said, jokingly, that Canada was almost as far from the Maritimes as from Australia. (Later, Howe remarked, entirely correctly, that the Maritimes were no nearer to Canada than was Britain to Austria, across half of Europe.) Less than 3 per cent of Canada’s exports went to the Maritimes, and the return flow was even smaller. A letter from Halifax took as long to reach Ottawa as it did to cross the Atlantic to Liverpool. There were no Canada–Maritime rail or road connections; just the St. Lawrence River, and it only in summer. Few Canadians had any commercial or personal reasons to make the laborious journey; nor, in reverse, did Maritimers. The Acadian Recorder of Halifax summed it all up: “We don’t know each other. We have no facilities or resources to mingle with each other. We are shut off from each other by a wilderness, geographically, commercially, politically and socially. We always cross the United States to shake hands.” By contrast, any Maritimer could travel to England in one of the steamships that now made the voyage in as little as ten days.

  Differences in self-perception widened the physical distance. The Maritime provinces were small: 350,000 inhabitants in Nova Scotia, 250,000 in New Brunswick, 80,000 in Prince Edward Island. But they were already mini-nations. Just as in the United Province of Canada, they had Responsible Government. In politics, they were ahead in some respects: New Brunswick had the secret ballot, and Nova Scotia had experimented with universal suffrage. It was the Maritimers who, at Charlottetown and Quebec City, had taken the innovative step of including opposition members in their delegations.

  Maritimers felt themselves superior to Canada, looking dubiously on its jumble of immigrants and its disturbing qualities of dynamism and brashness—an almost mirror image of the way Canadians viewed the United States.*140 They were, in other words, defensively superior. British North America’s first real theatre had opened in Halifax in 1787, and its first literary periodical began there twelve years later. The Royal Navy, with its base in Halifax, gave the small city a distinct social life. Confederation, if it happened, would bring the Maritimes no new gifts except the Intercolonial Railway, which would create short-term jobs but over time bring new competition for the small and inefficient local business class. Tupper warned Macdonald that “a great body of the trading men comprising the most wealthy merchants” opposed Confederation.

  Just as critical, all three Maritime provinces were booming, due chiefly to Reciprocity with the United States and the demand created by the Civil War. These, too, were the great days of the sailing ship: one in three ships entering Boston Harbor started out from Nova Scotia. That Maritimers were living on borrowed time was not yet realized, with the steam engine, the screw propeller and the iron hull all soon to turn even the finest wood and sail ships into museum pieces. Why risk any of this prosperity, they argued, for what Howe called “this crazy Confederacy with a mongrel crew, half-English, half-French”? Why give up John Bull for Jack Frost?

  There was a good reason to make such a switch, one that Howe undoubtedly realized as it became the principal cause of his anger and his anguish. John Bull was showing clear signs of wanting to get rid of the Maritimes by thrusting them into the arms of Jack Frost. Confederation would enable Britain to distance itself from Canada, most certainly so militarily. Of lesser consequence, yet still useful, Confederation would enable Britain to rid itself of the Maritimes—except for the vital Halifax base, which was considered as important to the Empire as Gibraltar or Malta.

  As Howe would have been the first to understand, and so have wanted to rage against the dying of the light, the Maritimes in the end had nowhere to go other than into a union with Canada. Alone, they would be lost. The only alternative was Maritime Union, something New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island feared even more than union with “mongrel” Canada. Ottawa, unlike Halifax, was at least not next door.

  The Maritimers who struggled against Confederation were major contributors to their own defeat. They failed to unite themselves, so they never spoke with a single, magnified voice. They trusted Britain. They failed to do their homework until it was too late. At the Quebec Conference, Brown wrote dismissively that “we hear much talkee-talkee” from the Maritimers, “but not very much administrative ability.” And they deluded themselves that they could outfox Macdonald.

  Before Macdonald appears back on stage, it’s necessary to describe the scenery against which this particular act unfolded. This backdrop was not something physical but a force far more substantial—a psychological attitude that had hardened into an utter conviction.

  During the twenty-first century, Canadians have come to define themselves by their tolerance—a quality now accepted almost universally as the feature that makes us a distinct people. The acceptance of difference—indeed, its outright celebration—has gained a talismanic power among contemporary Canadians. To be tolerant is to be a Canadian. To be intolerant is not just to be personally racist or exclusionary, but to possess the attribute of someone who is not a real member of the Canadian community.

  The equivalent talismanic virtue in nineteenth-century Canada was loyalty. To be disloyal, even to doubt the centrality of the importance of loyalty, was to be something less than a full Canadian. Expressions of disloyalty divided the community and threatened its identity. Loyalty distinguished the nation from its neighbour even more definitively than tolerance does today. Canada was loyal; the United States was disloyal, or had been when it rebelled. No other cross-border differences needed to be identified or constructed.*141

  The object of Canadians’ loyalty was Britain, the Empire, the Crown, personified so alluringly by Queen Victoria. Even more so, Britain was exemplified by such institutions as the parliamentary system and the judicial system, and by British values of fair play, a stiff upper lip and a man’s words being his bond, no matter whether they were for real or just for boasting.

  Loyalty wasn’t only about being British. Loyalty was a cardinal virtue—its near kin being fidelity—and extended to loyalty to family, to the marriage vows (there were incomparably fewer divorces in Canada than in the United States), to friends, to tribe or clan or community, and to religion (Canadians who exchanged one faith for another faith were called “perverts”). As the educator Egerton Ryerson put it, “it is a reverence for, and attachment to, the laws, order, institutions and freedom of the country.”

  Being loyal was seen as synonymous with being God-fearing. Ryerson observed that if “a man does not love the King, he cannot love God.” And the Reverend J.W.D. Gray informed his parishioners that the “spirit of submission to lawful authority... lies at the foundation of your loyalty to your earthly Sovereign.”

  The potency of the ethic of loyalty, conjoining as it did an earthly sovereign with a heavenly one and with the rule of law, was overwhelming. It made Canadians not just proud to be who they were (and not to be Americans) but ebulliently, braggartly proud. There was not the least shyness about Canadians’ loyalty. Flags were waved, songs were sung and public figures competed in their expressions of devotion to Crown and Queen. Canadians in the mid-nineteenth century may well have been more patriotic than were Americans, but to the mother country rather than to their own country. Macdonald, the great loyalist, heightened the stakes, and advanced his partisan cause, by accusing his opponents of “treason.”

  It all began with the Loyalists. There were only about fifty thousand of them, but their spirit defined Upper Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and the far larger number of British immigrants who followed took over the torch from them. That torch was the Loyalist Myth—the chronicles of their suffering and sacrifice for the sake of their loyalty to the Crown. It was much embellished, as all national foundational myths always are. In his book The Sense of
Power, historian Carl Berger makes two perceptive points. One is that “nationalistic history was just as much an instrument for survival for the British-Canadian Loyalists as it was for the French-Canadians.” The other is that the Loyalists brought with them not so much British institutions as “its inner spirit”—assumptions such as “the primacy of the community over individual selfishness, society conceived as an organism of functionally related parts…religion as the mortar of the social order, and the distrust of materialism.” The British connection has long vanished, but it takes only a short dig down to the sedimentary layer once occupied by the Loyalists to locate the sources of a great many contemporary Canadian convictions and conventions.

  Perhaps the most eloquent expression of the force of loyalty in Canada among English Canadians was made by a British Columbia Legislature member, T.L. Wood, in a debate about possible entry into Confederation. “The bond of union between Canada and the other provinces bears no resemblance to the union between England and her colonial possessions,” Wood said. “There is not natural love and feeling of loyalty. The feeling of loyalty towards England is a blind feeling, instinctive, strong, born with us and impossible to shake off.”

  If the loyalty of English Canadians was so potent and deeply rooted because it was instinctual, that among Canadiens was as strong, even if unemotional, precisely because it was self-interested and calculated. Cartier summed it up during the Confederation Debates when he said that the reason the Canadiens “had their institutions, their language and their religion intact today, was because of their adherence to the British Crown.” Back in 1846 Étienne-Paschal Taché had famously proclaimed that “the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.” Here resided the magical, however paradoxical, effect of the creed of loyalty among Canadians: being loyal to another nation and to an absent monarch kept Canadians loyal to each other.

  Macdonald, to return to the theme of this book, was not merely a loyalist: he embodied it in his very person. In his 1883 biography of Macdonald, the journalist J.E. Collins wrote that “more than any other Canadian statesman…[he] taught us the duty of loyalty.” In his lifelong battle to keep Canada un-American, Macdonald’s most potent instrument was Canadians’ loyalty to Britain. No less valuable was the particular nature of his own loyalty to Britain.

  His was fiercely loyal, of course; but there was no deference in his posture. Macdonald was exactly the kind of colonial, or foreigner, who could break through English reserve and snobbery simply because there was not a trace of colonial cringe about him. As the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin, himself a British immigrant, observed, Macdonald was “the type of politician who has never failed to delight the English people—the man who, like Palmerston, can work hard, do strong things, hold his purpose, never lose sight for a moment of the honour and welfare of his country, and yet crack his joke and have his laugh…. There is nothing viewy about Sir John Macdonald.” In short, whenever in Britain, Macdonald regarded himself as an equal, and he was accepted as one.

  Only when the British Empire began to fade and fall apart did loyalty lose its magnetic appeal to Canadians; thereafter, as was incomparably more challenging, Canadians had to find reasons to be loyal to themselves.

  In the task of turning around public opinion in the Maritimes, loyalty constituted Macdonald’s secret weapon. In Nova Scotia, loyalty to Britain, beginning with that of the tortured Joseph Howe, was even deeper than in Canada. In New Brunswick, attitudes were more ambiguous. After an 1864 visit there, the editor of the Kingston British American wrote, “They are more American [than Canadians]—more democratic in their tastes—have more of the ‘free’ swagger in their manners…more flash-dressed ladies at Theatres and Concerts.”

  What Macdonald now had to do was make certain that Maritimers understood what it was that Britain wanted of them—to join Canada. This, therefore, is what he proceeded to do.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Turn of the Screw

  The left arm is then extended a little, and the Queen laid her hand upon it which I touched slightly with my lips. Alexander Tilloch Galt, describing his presentation to the Queen

  Sometime in the spring of 1865, Macdonald figured out how to haul the Maritime provinces onto the side of Confederation. He would appeal to their sentiments about Britain. To do that, a Fathers of Confederation mission would call upon the Great White Mother.

  No real reason existed for Macdonald and the other Canadian leaders to go over to London. In the legislature, Macdonald described the group’s purpose as “to take stock…with the British Government”—about as vague a description as he could concoct. For a time Macdonald even protested that he was too busy to go. This excuse was blatantly untrue, because he was due to go to Oxford to collect his treasured honorary degree. But once Macdonald had committed himself to the trip, a doubting Brown agreed to go along as well. The actual topics to be discussed while they were in London were not easy to compile: the Imperial government had already made clear its wholehearted support for Confederation, and although there were defence matters to go over—the Canadian government had just voted one million dollars for new defence works—no one in London had the least interest in provoking the United States by new military projects. Nevertheless, off went the Big Four—first Cartier and Galt in a ship that made a stopover in Halifax, giving them time for discussions on railway matters there, and then Macdonald and Brown shortly afterwards on a different vessel. The real purpose of their mission was to use the Imperial government to get the Maritimers to turn around and face in the right direction.

  The softening process has already begun. The colonial secretary, Edward Cardwell, after his meeting with Brown the previous December, had dispatched to Canada the laudatory memorandum on Confederation that had so pleased his visitor. Still more useful was the covering note attached by Cardwell to the copies he sent to the Maritime lieutenant-governors. “Our official dispatch,” he wrote to Arthur Gordon in New Brunswick, “will show you that Her Majesty’s Government wish you to give the whole [Confederation] scheme all the support and assistance in your power.” Britain’s general policy, he explained, was “to turn the screw as hard as will be useful, but not harder.” Two discrete turns of the screw were then applied. Gordon was reminded that his career depended on his shepherding New Brunswickers towards voting for Confederation. His counterpart in Nova Scotia, Sir Richard MacDonnell, who had made no secret of his opposition to Confederation, was pulled out completely and sent to Hong Kong. He was replaced by a soldier hero, Sir William Fenwick Williams, who knew how to take orders. Less successfully, Prince Edward Islanders were warned that the bill for the salary of their lieutenant-governor might be transferred from London to Charlottetown, but this pressure made them only more truculent than they already were.

  For the Big Four, the reception in London was at least as agreeable as had been the earlier one for Brown alone. The Colonial Office chose the moment of Macdonald’s arrival to send word to the Maritime capitals that Maritime Union was no longer discussible; all that was left on the Maritimes’ negotiating table, therefore, was Confederation.

  The quartet did have diligent discussions with the appropriate British politicians on matters such as defence, Confederation, the prospects for Canada’s renewing the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States and the future of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West. At the only meeting that actually mattered, none of these topics was raised. That was the meeting with Her Majesty.

  On May 18 the four went excitedly to Buckingham Palace in a carriage that picked them up at the Westminster Palace Hotel. On arriving, they discovered, to their mixed pride and terror, that Queen Victoria had asked for them to be presented first. “Dukes and Duchesses had to give way and open up a passage to us,” Brown reported to Anne. The procedure that followed was a trifle more complicated: it involved, as Galt described it to his wife, going “down on the right knee (a matter involving, in my
own case, a slight mental doubt as to the tenacity of my breeches), the left arm is then extended a little, and the Queen laid her hand upon it which I touched slightly with my lips.” That ordeal completed, the quartet was kept together so the Queen could engage them in small talk, including an exchange with Cartier in French. Then she glided away.

  Back across the Atlantic went a report that amounted to a command: Her Majesty and her Canadian ministers were as one.

  Earlier, the four had spent little time at the Westminster Palace Hotel, because night after night they were out dining at the mansions of dukes and lords and cabinet ministers and railway magnates, or they went to balls where coiffed, bare-shouldered ladies exhibited a remarkable interest in the details of Canadian politics, economics and culture. No less deeply interested in Canadian doings was the Prince of Wales. He had them over to dinner at Buckingham Palace, drew them into an inside room filled with a specially selected group of one hundred of the two thousand guests, and while chatting with them smoked cigars and showed off his new Turkish dressing gown. (In an exercise in re-gifting, Galt was given one of these cigars, which earlier had been presented to the prince by the King of Portugal.) Less interested in the Canadians and in Canada was Bishop Wilberforce, who, as Brown reported to Anne, asked “whether Darwin believed that ‘turnips are tending to become men.’”

  Queen Victoria. The last British monarch with real political influence, she used it to give Confederation the push it needed to overcome Maritime opposition.

  They also went to the Epsom Downs on Derby Day, taking with them a hamper of food and wine from Fortnum and Mason. The Times’s famed war correspondent from the Crimean War, William Russell, took them around, getting them into one of the most socially fashionable of tents, where they sipped turtle soup and champagne cup. They took in the races (Macdonald won twenty guineas) and gazed, as Galt reported to his wife, at “the sights of the course, gypsies, music, mountebanks, games of all kinds, menageries of savage animals, and shows of Irishmen disguised as savage Indians.” On the jam-packed road driving back, they used the roof of their carriage as a mobile platform from which to fire dried peas through a peashooter at passersby, who, as was customary, fired back balls of flour. Brown and Macdonald also went together to the opera Lucrezia Borgia.