Toronto Public Library
View of Quebec City, from William H. Bartlett, Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1854) (Chapter 2)
View of Kingston, from William H. Bartlett, Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1854) (Chapter 2)
View of Hallowell, from William H. Bartlett, Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1854) (Chapter 4)
George Brown T30668 (Chapter 9)
“Double shuffle” cartoon, 1858 (Chapter 11)
Grand Trunk Railway poster (Chapter 13)
Anne Brown (Chapter 16)
Fenian raid, Port Colborne, June 1, 1866 (Chapter 21)
RICHARD GWYN is an award-winning author and political columnist, well known to readers of the Toronto Star and to TV and radio audiences. He is the author of two highly praised biographies, The Unlikely Revolutionary on Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and The Northern Magus on Pierre Elliot Trudeau. His most recent book, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, was selected by The Literary Review of Canada as one of the 100 most important books published in Canada.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2008
Copyright © 2007 R & A Gwyn Associates Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2007.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gwyn, Richard, 1934–
John A.: the man who made us: the life and times of John A. Macdonald / Richard Gwyn.
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: v. 1. 1815–1867.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37135-5
1. Macdonald, John A. ( John Alexander), 1815–1891. 2. Canada—History—19th century. 3. Canada—Politics and government—19th century. 4. Prime ministers—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
FC516.M29G89 2008 971.05'1092 C2008-900315-2
v1.0
FOOTNOTES
*1 Hugh Macdonald recorded the birthdates of all his children in the 1820 edition of his memorandum book.
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*2 A small town, then and now, Dornoch has one claim to fame as the site of the last judicial execution for witchcraft in Britain: in 1727, a court ruled that a Janet Horne had turned her daughter into a pony.
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†3 E.B. Biggar’s Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald, hurried into print in 1891, the year of his death, is the source of most of the best-known anecdotes about him. The first biography of Macdonald, The Life and Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald, published as early as 1883, was written by J.E. Collins, an expatriate Newfoundlander. By a curious coincidence, Collins also wrote the first biography of Louis Riel as well as a bodice-ripper of a novel, Annette, the Metis Spy: A Heroine of the N.W. Rebellion. He died in New York, of drink, in 1892.
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*4 Immigrants were then commonly referred to as “emigrants,” because the significant point was that they were leaving Britain rather than that they were coming to Canada.
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*5 While Simcoe’s legislation ended the slave system, it did not immediately end slavery: owners of existing slaves were allowed to hang on to their “property,” although almost all were released within a few years. By gaining legal equality, blacks in Canada did not in any way gain social and economic equality.
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*6 To minimize the cost of feeding their passengers, some captains were known to supply them on the first day with large helpings of porridge and molasses, making them so sick that, thereafter, they seldom demanded their full rations.
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*7 The real hero of this feat wasn’t so much Sydenham as a stagecoach operator in Toronto (York), William Weller, who organized the relays of horses needed to maintain an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. For his contributions, Weller received four hundred dollars and a gold watch.
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*8 The source is Fingard’s study “The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815–1860.”
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*9 In the absence of any zoning regulations, grand houses, shacks, stores and grog shops all jostled against one another.
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*10 This plot was purchased by John A. Macdonald in 1850. The remains of Hugh Macdonald, who had been buried in the old “Lower” Burial Ground, were brought there, but not, apparently, the remains of James Macdonald.
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*11 In 1830 there were only two universities in British North America—Dalhousie and McGill. Sending Macdonald to either of them would have been quite beyond the family’s financial capacity.
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†12 Macdonald, who closely followed news from Britain, would also have been aware that Disraeli eventually commanded advances of an amazing £10,000, more even than Dickens or Trollope—a reflection, naturally, more of his appeal as a celebrity than of his skill as a novelist.
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*13 The stone mill, little changed, still stands in Glenora, Prince Edward County.
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*14 One observation by Smith in The Wealth of Nations of more direct interest to Canadians was that Britain should let go its North American colonies, both to escape from the cost of “supporting any part of their civil or military establishments” and, more urgently, from a cause as sure to be lost, in his view, as had the thirteen American colonies.
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*15 An excellent article on Macdonald’s speech patterns, from which some of this material is drawn, is Ged Martin’s piece of splendid title in the British Journal of Canadian Studies (2004), “Sir John Eh? Macdonald.”
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*16 This house, at 110 Rideau Street, still stands and has been converted into an exquisite small museum about Macdonald by its present owners, Donna Ivey and Norma Kelly. On a wallboard in the attic, the initials “L.M.” have been carved, perhaps standing for Macdonald’s sister Louisa, but more probably for his cousin Lowther Macpherson.
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*17 A prime source for the material in this section has been the excellent master’s thesis “A Dead and Alive Way Never Does,” by William Teatero for Queen’s University in 1978.
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*18 There was always an edge to Campbell’s comments about Macdonald. “He never became in my judgment a good lawyer,” he said, “but was always a dangerous man in the courts.” One cause, despite their long relationship, was very likely Campbell’s resentment that Macdonald dropped him from the plum portfolio of minister of justice in 1885.
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*19 All these surviving letters, together with an excellent introduction, are contained in Keith Johnson’s Affectionately Yours: The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and His Family.
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*20 The authority on Macdonald’s business affairs is the historian Keith Johnson, most particularly in his “John A. Macdonald, the Young Non-Politician,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1971.
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*21 The “all politics is local” aphorism is generally attributed to “Tip” O’Neill, the powerful Democratic House leader in the United States from 1977 to 1987.
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*22 The Canadian Commercial Revolu
tion was published in 1936 by the historian Gilbert Norman Tucker. It was his doctoral thesis.
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*23 A few years after Kingston’s fall from grace, an English visitor noted that the town had “a rather dreary appearance” and that many streets were “over-run with grass.”
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*24 The Maritimes, then quite separate colonies, had both Poor Laws and Poor Houses.
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*25 The first legislation in British North America to establish free education was in Prince Edward Island in 1852. Nova Scotia followed in 1864, and Ontario only after Confederation.
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*26 No official Hansard record existed during these years. In an inspired project, the Parliamentary Library has assembled a “virtual Hansard” by collating the near-verbatim reports of debates as published in the newspapers of the time on the basis of accounts sent in by shorthand reporters. The post-Confederation series is all but complete; that for the pre-Confederation Legislative Assembly, though, extends only up to 1856. One editorial challenge is that newspapers often gave short shrift or no shrift at all to members of parties they opposed.
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†27 His actual name was De Bleury.
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*28 This portrait is of the correct period—the 1840s—and comes from the Kingston area. The woman in it has dark eyes, though, rather than the light-blue eyes Isabella was known to have.
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*29 The paucity of surviving letters by Isabella is striking because, being frequently away from Macdonald for extended periods, she must have written often to him and to other family members.
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*30 Opium was widely available in the mid-nineteenth century and a common ingredient in patent medicines, such as Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Godfrey’s Cordial and McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, all of which could be bought without a prescription at drugstores. In its most common form, especially favoured by women, it was sold as laudanum.
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*31 Macdonald’s use of Shero poses a tantalizing mystery, perhaps an insolvable one. None of the standard etymology dictionaries consulted by the author cite any uses of the word in the nineteenth century; rather, “shero” is a modern neologism (s-hero) minted by the feminist movement. It seems that Macdonald either invented it as a tease or overheard it, perhaps from his strong-minded and highly intelligent mother.
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*32 Stewart, an expatriate Scot, teaches at Michigan State University.
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*33 The only serious competitor for the title of “most important” would be the Rowell-Sirois Report of 1940, from the commission established originally to equip the federal government with the tools to cure the Great Depression of the previous decade. When this mission was fulfilled anyway by the economic boom generated by the Second World War, the commission’s report was used to justify transferring jurisdictional responsibilities and revenues to the federal government in order to transform Canada into a welfare state.
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†34 Durham’s use of the word “race” will strike contemporary ears as odd. It was used then to describe people now usually referred to as “ethnic groups.”
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*35 Officially, Upper Canada now became Canada West, and Lower Canada became Canada East. In fact, almost everyone continued to refer to the new sections by their old titles, and for simplicity’s sake this older terminology to describe today’s Ontario and Quebec is used throughout this text. (In fact, the legislature relegalized the use of the old Upper and Lower Canada terms in 1849.)
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*36 A parallel exists with the publication in 1965 of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, predicting Canada’s inevitable absorption by America. In response, English-Canadian nationalists suddenly stood on guard for their country.
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*37 The term ultramontanism meant “over the mountains” to Rome. The movement began as a reaction, led by Pope Pius IX, to the ascendant liberalism sweeping across Europe; it was defensive but also reformist.
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*38 The initiation of the new legislature of the United Province of Canada was accomplished through the swearing in of Sydenham as governor general in Montreal on February 10, 1841. Proclamations in both languages were posted on the main streets, but they were all ripped down overnight.
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*39 Lord Elgin was the son of the British ambassador in Athens who spirited away the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum.
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*40 In the nineteenth century, the customary term for patronage was the much more descriptive one of “jobbery.” It had, in fact, an honorable intellectual parentage. Adam Smith, in his great Wealth of Nations, argued that the loss of the American colonies might have been prevented had only some of their leaders been offered “the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state-lottery of British politics.” Perhaps what the Founding Fathers were really after was less liberty than patronage.
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*41 Macdonald’s patron, Draper, had managed to avoid the firing line ahead of this debacle by getting himself appointed to the bench.
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*42 The most approving comment about Britain’s adoption of free trade came from across the Atlantic, from Andrew Carnegie, the Scot expatriate now well on his way to fame and fortune in the United States. Trade didn’t follow the flag, declared Carnegie; rather, “trade follows the lowest price current. If a dealer in any colony wished to buy Union Jacks he would order them from Britain’s worst foe if he could save sixpence.”
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*43 William Draper, Conservative leader and premier when Macdonald entered politics, made some attempts to reach out to Canadien members, but he lacked the skills to make it happen.
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*44 The first, modern-style, organized political party in Britain can be dated to Gladstone’s Liberals of the 1880s.
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*45 Laurier actually spoke English with a slight Scots accent, having learned the language in the Lower Canada settlement of New Glasgow—an area originally settled by Scots.
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*46 Ged Martin unearthed the François Bourassa story in Roger Le Moine’s 1974 book, Napoléon Bourassa l’homme et l’artiste. The French novel Macdonald supposedly was reading was Le Diable boiteux[The Devil on Two Sticks] by Alain-René Lesage. It’s about romantic misadventures involving greybeards marrying young girls, and bankrupt heiresses marrying fortune hunters. It’s hard to believe it would be to Macdonald’s taste.
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*47 Apologists claimed that Hincks had clung to office only to prevent Brown from replacing him with a ministry from which all French Canadians would be excluded. This effort may account for his being rewarded in 1856 with an appointment by the British government as governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands. He later returned to Canada as Macdonald’s post-Confederation minister of finance.
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*48 Macdonald actually missed the wedding because he was detained in Quebec City on legislature business. He got Louisa to buy his present for the couple: “I wish that Moll should have a good kit, & I wish you to spend £25 for her on such things as you like. Don’t say anything to her about it.”
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*49 Brown condemned the slavers with the vivid phrase “men-stealers,” describing them as “a disgrace not only to Americans but to the whole world.”
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*50 “Rep by Pop” was a most persuasive slogan, although what Brown really had in mind was rep by section—namely, that Upper and Lower Canada should have seats in proportion to their respective total populations. As was most curious, throughout the long Rep by Pop debate, little notice was ever taken of t
he fact that Upper Canada’s own constituencies were even more unbalanced, varying as widely as from 4, 100 for Brockville to 80, 000 for Huron-Bruce.
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*51 One of the might-have-beens in the development of Canadian intellectual life is Thomas Huxley, the great champion and popularizer of Darwin’s theory of evolution, who applied for and almost secured in the mid-1850s the post of professor of natural history at the University of Toronto. The slot was filled, instead, by the brother of Premier Sir Francis Hincks.
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*52 Before Confederation and after it for several decades, premiers and prime ministers functioned at the same time as a regular cabinet minister. The practice eventually died out, although John Diefenbaker was both prime minister and minister of external affairs for a time in the years 1957 to 959. A rough contemporary equivalent would be that deputy prime ministers, largely a symbolic title, always hold a departmental portfolio.
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*53 Before Drinkwater, R.A. Harrison, later chief justice of Upper Canada, and Hewitt Bernard, later his brother-in-law, functioned as Macdonald’s private secretary while also performing other departmental duties.
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*54 Sowby’s master’s thesis, an exceptional one, was written in 1984 for Queen’s University.
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*55 Langton developed a system of reporting the budget accounts in the 1850s that remained Ottawa’s standard system down to the 1970s.
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†56 He did not keep all copies of his own letters or of incoming ones. At the end of an 1856 letter to Brown Chamberlain of the Montreal Gazette in which he had made some frank political observations, Macdonald advised, “I hope you burn my letters. I do yours.” In fact, Chamberlain kept the letter.
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†57 Even his bitter opponent, Sir Richard Cartwright, admitted that Macdonald could “generally lay his hand on any document he wanted, even after a long lapse of years.”
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*58 Officially, their titles were those of attorneys general for Canada West and Canada East, or for each of the new “sections” within the United Province of Canada, but the old Upper and Lower Canada titles were widely used.
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