She and Macdonald met by happenstance, on December 8, 1866, while both were sauntering down Bond Street. However it happened, the relationship developed with lightning speed, much as it had between Macdonald and Isabella. By Christmas they were engaged.
Registration record of the February 16, 1867, marriage of John A. Macdonald, “widower,” and Susan Agnes Bernard, “spinster,” both being of “full” age.
They wed six weeks later, at St. George’s Anglican Church in Hanover Square, on February 16, 1867. (It was a most fashionable church. Two British prime ministers were married there, Disraeli and Asquith, and one American president, Theodore Roosevelt). It was all done so quickly that there was no time for reading the banns, for which a special dispensation had to be secured from the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the occasion, Macdonald wore a “Superfine Black Dress Coat with sleeve linings [and] corded silk breast facing,” as well as a sword. Agnes wore a long dress of white satin and a veil of Brussels lace. The bridesmaids included the daughters of three of the Fathers of Confederation. After the service, Hewitt Bernard hosted a breakfast for ninety at the Westminster Palace Hotel; the Ottawa Citizen reported that “a bunch of violets and snow-drops” adorned each plate. In his speech, Macdonald compared his union with Agnes with the one he was on the verge of completing with the provinces. In the marriage register, Macdonald changed his “profession” from that of “cabinet-maker,” as he’d given in Charlottetown. Here, with surely a twinkle in his eye, he listed it as “Hon-ble”—Honourable.*171
The happy couple honeymooned in Oxford. Then they returned hurriedly in time to hear the British North America Bill being introduced into the House of Lords.
Agnes and John A. were always husband and wife, rather than partners in the manner of the Disraelis†172 or of George and Anne Brown. But they connected intimately at two vital points. Macdonald possessed a first-rate mind: he read omnivorously, had an exceptional memory and would quote in the legislature and Parliament from novelists such as Dickens and Trollope, from Shakespeare, and from parliamentary greats such as Pitt and Peel and Sheridan and Walpole. Agnes, similarly, was highly intelligent and read at least as much (certainly more novels, often reading them while waiting in his office for him at the end of a long day in the Commons). In the provincial Canada of those days, there weren’t many like this pair. Agnes provided Macdonald with an opportunity to stretch his intellectual wings beyond the usual politician’s fare of government reports and newspapers and campaign anecdotes. She gave him someone he could talk to about ideas and literature, and about such un-Canadian topics as beauty. They were partners as well in another joint enterprise. It took Agnes a long time, it wasn’t in the least easy, and there were many setbacks, but because of her care and watchfulness and bullying, Macdonald eventually broke the grip of alcohol on himself. If the biographer E.B. Biggar is right, Agnes may have extended his life by two decades.
Nevertheless, Macdonald for most of the time was a politician, with political jobs to be done. Agnes, for her part, had to set out now to learn the tasks and tricks of being a political wife. One learning experience came quickly. Just over a week after becoming Mrs. John A. Macdonald, Agnes, accompanied by Lady Carnarvon, was presented to the Queen in a general audience at Buckingham Palace. Macdonald afterwards wrote to Louisa, “My wife likes it from its novelty to her, but it rather bores me as I have seen it all before.” His indifference was pure posture; Agnes, though, had yet to learn to pretend that she wasn’t impressed.
The passage of the British North America Act through the Parliament of Westminster began, in the House of Lords, on February 12. In his speech, Carnarvon laid it on lavishly: “We are laying the foundation of a great State—perhaps one that at a future day may even overshadow this country…we have shown neither indifference to their wishes nor jealousy of their aspirations.” Macdonald heard it all from the gallery, with Agnes beside him. He was surely reassured by the almost complete absence of any expressions of dissent. But he must also have been worried that the crisis in the government caused by Disraeli’s insistence on introducing a new version of the Reform Bill to extend the franchise yet more widely might cause the government’s defeat and Parliament’s closure for an election. Even if a breakup were avoided, the crisis would make it ever harder for the British parliamentarians to find the time to deal with so minor a matter as a new constitution for an old colony.
On February 26, the British North America Bill slipped through the Lords, despite the appeals of some members that the measure should be temporarily set aside so that Parliament could address “a prospect which affects its own existence”—namely, the Reform Bill. Just one day later, the bill was hurriedly introduced into the Commons.
A brief moment of release from the pressure came Macdonald’s way. He and four of the delegates were presented to the Queen in a private audience. Macdonald knelt and kissed the extended hand. As he later wrote to Louisa, “On rising, she said, ‘I am very glad to see you on this mission.’” He told her how loyal Canadians were to the Crown: “H.M. said—‘It is a very important measure, and you have all exhibited so much loyalty.’” Queen Victoria could influence many things, but not how Parliament did its business.
In the Commons, responsibility for piloting the bill through the chamber fell to the junior minister for the colonies, C.B. Adderley. To head off attempts to amend specific clauses in the bill, he described the measure as “a matter of a most delicate treaty and compact between the Provinces,” thereby providing ammunition for generations of Canadian constitutional lawyers.*173 Criticism came from the Radical John Bright, an ardent advocate of liberating the colonies to look after themselves. As must have delighted Macdonald, Bright gave an indifferent speech and failed to attract any support.
On March 4 the House went into committee to study the details. Almost no changes were asked for or even mentioned. That same day the crisis over the Reform Bill broke: Disraeli had presented to the cabinet his radical scheme for increasing the franchise—the start of his rise to the prime ministership as the champion of an alliance of the aristocracy and the working class against their common enemy, the new middle class. Three Conservative ministers, Carnarvon among them, resigned in protest at this dangerous sally into democracy.
Adderley, though, remained at his post. Suddenly, it was all over. On Friday, March 8, the bill passed third reading without a single word of debate and with the Commons clerk gabbling through the clauses so fast that few MPs could have understood a word of what it was they were voting on. On March 29 the Queen granted Royal Assent.
In fact, it had all happened too easily and too quickly. An anti-Confederate Nova Scotian watching the scene from the gallery wrote home, “The great body of the house was utterly indifferent, even the [Canadian] delegates seemed chagrined at the lazy contempt with which a thin House suffered their bill to pass unnoticed…this utter indifference was more mortifying to me than positive opposition…. It showed they considered Colonist beings so little related to them as the inhabitants of some nameless Chinese mud village.”
Macdonald, in his 1889 letter to the then colonial secretary, Lord Knutsford, looked back with regret and anger: “This remarkable event in the history of the British Empire passed almost without notice.” The British politicians had been “quite unable, from the constitution of their minds, to rise to the occasion.” Confederation had been treated “much as if the B.N.A. Act were a private Bill uniting two or three English parishes.”*174 Macdonald’s rage at the diminution of his and of Canada’s historic achievement was understandable, even if allowance is made for the fact that the obsession of the British MPs with the crisis over their Reform Bill was also valid. Of course, being British, the instant the British North America Bill was done with, the MPs switched to debate enthusiastically a bill to reform the system of funding homes for “Destitute Dogs.” D’Arcy McGee understood best what had happened: “Everyone knew the result was a foregone conclusion, and they are not apt in England to debate matt
ers already decided.”
There were, inevitably, some serious flaws in the constitution that would govern the Canadian Confederation from its birth. No provision was made for amendments to the constitution. The most vital part of any federation, and always its most contentious—the allocation of different powers to the different levels of government—was done quickly and negligently (no thought given to the status of cities, for example), and with scarcely any debate at all. The Aboriginal people were entirely overlooked. Whereas the Royal Proclamation of 1763 had declared that Indians “should not be molested or disturbed” on their historic hunting grounds, no mention of them was made in the British North America Act, except to identify Indians as a subject of federal jurisdiction. Lastly, two provinces—Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland—remained outside Confederation and so outside its constitution. Typically, the Newfoundlanders said no with a flourish: Confederation was roundly rejected in an election in 1869, with the leading anti-Confederate, Charles Fox Bennett, warning that if they joined, their sons would end up as cannon-fodder, “leaving their bones to bleach in a foreign land.”
The Canada Macdonald Made
Still, the act encompassed substantial achievements. It was the first ever constitution to be written by the colonials themselves. It enshrined protection for a minority people, even if only in the limited, permissive form of declaring that the French language “may” be used in Parliament and federal courts. It created a strong central government, and also—not an easy feat to pull off simultaneously—provincial governments with the potential to be strong. It created, or so everyone at the time assumed, a new Canadian common market: Clause 121 provided that “All Articles of the Growth, Produce or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces…shall be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” It was used later as a blueprint for the 1877 draft confederation of the South Africa Act and for Gladstone’s 1886 proposed Home Rule for Ireland.
At the time, all that really mattered was that the deed was done. Canada was about to emerge in the world as a confederation. Once so reconfigured, it could, as its constitution provided for specifically, extend itself right across the entire top half of the continent, initially eastwards, subsequently westwards. This achievement wouldn’t make Canada’s survival certain, but it would transform Canada’s geopolitical character. Until then, the British-American colonies had added up to little more than the accidental detritus of empire—semi-detached statelets somehow left behind in a remote nest of the mother country when the American colonies struck out on their own. In their place there now would be a state with the inherent logic of a community bordered on three sides by salt water and, within these boundaries, stretching out unbrokenly “from sea to sea.” The old scattered colonies could never have amounted to more than states in transition; the new one would have the potential to be a permanent state, provided only that its people so willed.
Canadians themselves had created this new state by an exercise of political will that matched almost exactly the one Macdonald had laid down at Quebec City just over two years earlier: “We must, therefore, become important, not only to England but in the eyes of foreign states. And most especially to the United States…. The great security for peace is to convince the world of our strength by being united.”
The single most important decision taken by Canadians in the nineteenth century was not to form a confederation but, rather, not to become American. Confederation mattered decisively, of course: it was the necessary means to achieve a national unity, and a national ambition, that others would notice and respect. But it was only a means, not an end. That end was a non-American nation-state in North America with enough of the stuff, of will and nerve, to survive—and, no less, with an unbroken connection to Britain. It was, moreover, an uncommonly ambitious nation. Included in its constitution was a pledge—indeed, “a duty of the Government and Parliament of Canada”—to build a railway to Halifax and to the Atlantic, and to begin this construction within six months in order to bind the Maritimes to Canada’s heartland. Even more ambitious, and again included in the very constitution of the new nation, was provision for adding to this new nation the vast expanse of “Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory.” It was to be a union not so much of those provinces that joined Confederation but of all the top half of the North American continent.
It was by making this union that Macdonald made us. He made us in the way he had intended to all along—and he made us his way.
TWENTY-FOUR
Idea in the Wilderness
A brilliant future would certainly await us were it not for those wretched Yankees who hunger & thirst for Naboth’s field. John A. Macdonald
Macdonald and Agnes were back in Canada by early May 1867, proceeding directly to Ottawa. They moved into the “Quadrilateral,” the large house that Macdonald had shared with Hewitt Bernard and two legislature members (one of them Galt) ever since the government had moved from Quebec City to Ottawa late in 1865. The members moved out, but Bernard stayed on. These departures created room—sort of—for Macdonald and Agnes, and her mother, Theodora, too. In an instant, Macdonald had gone from solitude to being enfolded within the bosom of a family.*175
Marriage hadn’t altered Macdonald’s best-known personal habit. He had made a solemn marital vow to drink less, but not to never drink at all; “less,” as Macdonald undoubtedly reminded himself while taking this vow, can only be a subjective measurement. Soon after Macdonald was back, Deputy Minister Edmund Meredith noted in his diary, “John A. carried out of the lunchroom, hopelessly drunk. What a prospect Mrs. John A. has before her!” On the brighter side of his condition, Macdonald was now being cared for, and was eating more or less regularly. He didn’t have to worry about arranging to get the house cleaned or laundry seen to. And Agnes was there to express her own views about how “less” should be measured.
The Ottawa they had come to, and where Macdonald had so far lived only spasmodically between his many recent trips to England, was a lumber town of just under twenty thousand people. Its principal characteristic was to be the most verbally abused town in the country: visitors and its own citizens competed to excoriate the place. No one was ever able to top journalist Goldwin Smith’s well-known dismissal of Ottawa as “a sub-Arctic lumber village transformed by royal mandate into a political cockpit.” But many tried their best. Feo Monck, the governor general’s sister, made two diary entries about Ottawa, one describing it as “squalid,” the other as “beastly.”*176 Governor General Monck himself persisted in forecasting that Ottawa would be abandoned as the capital within a few years. Edmund Meredith, glancing back nostalgically at Quebec City, which he had just left, wrote in his diary, “The more I see of Ottawa, the more do I dislike and detest it…. Possibly the place may be fit for habitation in 50 years from now.”
Meredith was being no more than a pinch pessimistic. Ottawa had no sewers, no gas system, no water supply. Water, so-called, was delivered in barrels by door-to-door carts; the contents of one barrel when opened turned out to include a dead cat. The streets were like country roads, so that even a central street like Sparks challenged shoppers to make it from one side to the other through three inches of mud. No trees were planted anywhere within the town.*177 The river was chock full of logs; there were huge piles of sawdust on its banks; and the three hundred or more sawmills created an incessant noise. It was a rough town: Irish and French loggers engaged in repeated drunken brawls. The handful of “respectable” people ranged from lumber barons to a few professional men. There was an acute shortage of housing, due to the arrival from Quebec City of the politicians and some 350 civil servants, soon to become federal civil servants. Joseph Howe, the anti-Confederate Nova Scotian, called Ottawa “a shabby imitation of Washington” the Ottawa Citizen responded that he was grossly unfair.
There was another deficiency to Ottawa. It was about to become a one-industry town, that industry being politics. No less so, its entire social life and the vital decisions abou
t who was up or down or in or out, and about what should be talked about and what mattered, would henceforth be determined exclusively by politicians, or by their spouses. Goldwin Smith made a shrewd analysis of the consequences: because Ottawa lacked “the tempering and restraining influences which the mixed society of a real capital affords,” he wrote, the result would be “an unadulterated element of professional politicians, devoting their whole time to the undivided work of corruption and intrigue.” †178
Amid all the dross, there was one shining and quite astonishing exception: the three Parliament Buildings—the East Block, West Block and Centre Block—situated on what was then called Barrack’s Hill and soon to be renamed Parliament Hill, looking down at the churning Ottawa River far below and, northwards, out to the distant, dark blue rim of the Gatineau Hills. The site was spectacular, and so were the buildings. “The noblest architecture in North American…I know of no modern Gothic purer of its kind,” pronounced the novelist Anthony Trollope, happening by on a lecture tour in 1861. Most other visitors agreed with him.
Inevitably, though, there were defects. The buildings were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, because—inexplicably—the air vents had been placed close to the ceiling of each room. The main building, designed originally for the 130 members of the old United Province of Canada Legislature, was already too small for the 180 who would be coming in from the now four provinces. And, predictably, the buildings had cost far more than expected: the original estimate at the start of construction in 1860 had been an impressively exact $688,505; by Confederation Day, 1867, it had risen to just under $2.6 million; by completion, the figure topped $4.5 million, a sevenfold increase from the original estimate. Macdonald’s reaction was more practical: the buildings were at least largely finished, even if the towers still lacked roofs, and the Hill had been cleared of all the construction debris. He did complain privately that the tower of the West Block looked “like a cow bell.”
John A Page 36
