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†59 Archy Lanton was an escaped American slave who had made it across the border.
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*60 Much of the material for this section is drawn from the research done by historian Donald Smith of the University of Calgary and reported in his long article “John A. Macdonald and Aboriginal Canada,” published in Historic Kingston, 2002.
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*61 Macdonald was friendly also with John Cuthbertson, the son of a Scottish fur trader who had married a Mohawk woman.
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*62 Reiffenstein’s actual arrest, in 1869, was the talk of Ottawa, primarily because the police came to his house and arrested him at his own dinner table.
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*63 The Legislative Council, of which Taché was a member, was the pre-Confederation equivalent of the Senate.
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*64 In Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896.
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*65 As is the case with most early newspaper reports of parliamentary debates, the language of this quotation is curiously stilted, with Macdonald appearing to have spoken in the past tense. No Hansards were published before Confederation.
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*66 That Lower Canada’s agricultural productivity was at most one-fifth of that of Upper Canada was widely attributed to its antiquated seigneurial system.
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*67 The capital by this time rotated between Toronto and Quebec City, Montreal having lost the honour as a result of the burning of its parliament buildings in 1849 by a Conservative-organized mob.
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*68 Many years later, when Macdonald was sent a copy of Collins’s 1883 biography of him—the first—he didn’t bother to read it but “turned,” as he put it in a letter to a friend, to just two sections: one, understandably enough, was the Canadian Pacific Scandal; the other was the “double shuffle.”
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*69 Cauchon eventually crossed the floor to join the Liberals, becoming a minister in Alexander Mackenzie’s government.
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†70 There is a bust of him (in a Roman toga) in the Quebec City legislative building, and in Montreal, besides parks and schools, he is commemorated with an eighty-seven-foot-high statue inscribed with his cry, “Avant tous, je suis Canadien.”
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*71 Over succeeding years, a succession of transportation and communications enterprises, all either government agencies or dependent on government support, would locate in Montreal—Canadian National Railways, the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, Telesat Canada.
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*72 His wife, Hortense, was deeply pious. A family friend remarked that she would have been happiest as a nun—provided she was the Mother Superior. After Cartier’s death she moved to Cannes with her two daughters, dying there in 1898. One daughter, Hortense, lived on in Cannes until 1940, when she left hurriedly as the Germans approached. She died in London in 1941 at the age of ninety-three.
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*73 The rival time span occurred near to the century’s close and continued into the next, prompting a new prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, to predict that the twentieth century would belong to Canada.
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*74 From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” published in 1867.
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*75 This near declaration of race war was written not by Brown but by his able and extremist chief editorial writer, George Sheppard.
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*76 Macdonald’s spelling of “favour” in the American style of “favor” was unusual; he may have picked it up osmotically because he was writing from south of the border.
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*77 The tavern, now called the Royal Tavern, still exists, at 344 Princess Street in Kingston.
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*78 In his day, Bulwer-Lytton was far better known as a popular writer—as of the romantic novel The Last Days of Pompeii—than as a politician. Today, he’s best known as the inspiration for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing, which takes off from his famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” This association is a bit unfair, given that Bulwer-Lytton also minted the aphorism that writers love to quote, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
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*79 The most unorthodox version of confederation, submitted to the legislature of Upper Canada in 1825 and advocating a loose federation, was by Robert Gourlay, who turned out to have written it while in a lunatic asylum in England. Gourlay was an engaging eccentric and an agrarian radical. His most considerable accomplishment was, at the age of eighty, to contest a riding in Upper Canada and to marry his twenty-eight-year-old housekeeper. However, he lost both.
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*80 Creighton’s case for Macdonald as an early champion of Confederation rests primarily on a speech he gave in the House in April 1861 calling for “an immense confederation of free men, the greatest confederacy of civilized and intelligent men that has ever had an existence on the face of the globe.” All those golden phrases, though, were simply Macdonald at his “buncombe” best.
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*81 The imbalance wasn’t simply one of political representation in proportion to population. About three-quarters of all Canada’s tax revenues came from the Upper Canada “section.”
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*82 In his Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States, from which much of the material in this section is drawn, Ian Radforth observes that one problem for the tour’s organizers was that the towns and cities of then underdeveloped Canada lacked any of the “grand avenues and parade grounds” so necessary for ceremonial spectacles.
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*83 Newcastle thus became the first colonial secretary to visit the most important of the colonies he was responsible for, and the only one to do so during the nineteenth century.
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*84 Years later, the Prince of Wales encountered a Canadian MP in London who answered the prince’s inquiry by saying that he came from Kingston. “Ah,” replied Edward in a deft reference to his aborted visit, “it looks very well from the water.” Later still, on Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, he succeeded to the throne as Edward VII. Throughout his life, he remained exceptionally close to a great many ladies.
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*85 The unofficial official British view of Lincoln was even wider of the mark. Lord Lyons, the ambassador (minister) in Washington, informed London that Lincoln was “a rough westerner of the lowest origin and little education.”
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†86 Seward had formed this view as a result of an extensive trip he made in 1857 across the British North American colonies, even north to Labrador.
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*87 The evidence is questionable. In a book published in 1904, Goldwin Smith claimed that Gladstone had written to him during the war proposing that “if the North thought fit at this time to let the South go, it might in time be indemnified by…Canada.” Smith said that he had later destroyed Gladstone’s letter because it might “prove embarrassing.”
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*88 More than half of these Canadian volunteers were Canadiens. Mass migration from Quebec to the United States during the nineteenth century dates from the Civil War years, in large part because of the classic “pull” factor in migration—those who’ve already gone to or already know a new country always attract others to follow them.
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*89 Great Eastern raced across the Atlantic in a new record of eight days and six hours, going full speed through icefields—as would, less successfully, another “world’s largest ship” a half-century later.
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*90 Not unti
l 1887, in a conversation with his friend Judge Gowan, did Macdonald disclose for the first time his front-line experience, or, more accurately, his near to the front-line adventure. His company was placed safely behind the artillery that levelled the tavern and killed eleven of the hapless rebels.
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*91 The most powerful expression of Canadien sentiment about Americans was Premier Taché’s famous prediction 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.”
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*92 Polk’s name still lingers among Canadians as the author of the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight,” meaning that the border should be pushed way up north from the forty-ninth parallel.
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*93 In 1793 Governor Simcoe prohibited the importation of slaves into Canada. Existing owners were allowed to retain their slaves, but most were freed not long afterwards.
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*94 There was a small reverse flow, mostly of Northern draft dodgers, or “skeedadlers” as they were called, but most of them returned home once the Civil War was over, as did most of the runaway slaves. Late in the century, after the Midwest was filled up, American farmers moved north in search of land, particularly in Alberta.
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*95 A further defence problem revealed by the Trent crisis was that the telegraph line from Halifax to Montreal was being tapped by the Americans.
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*96 The Globe’s first reference to Macdonald’s habit, in February 1856, was in the correct, coded form of describing him as speaking in the legislature “in a state of wild excitement.”
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*97 Even the term “alcoholic,” applied to a person, didn’t exist then. It was not coined until 1891, the year of Macdonald’s death.
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*98 The first to make this observation was Frank Underhill. In a paper he presented to the Canadian Historical Association in 1927, Underhill, in the terminology of those less-evolved times, described Anne Brown as “perhaps the real father of Confederation.”
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*99 In counterpoint to whatever credit Britain gained by its abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833, it incurred the off-setting discredit of initiating the Opium Wars at about the same time, employing the Royal Navy to blast open China’s ports to the opium trade.
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*100 Accident played a large part in determining that nineteenth-century Canada was among the blotches of red on the map. In the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Prime Minister Pitt the Elder came close to handing Canada back in exchange for France’s sugar-rich islands of Guadeloupe. In the end, he held on to Canada largely out of fear of public outrage at the abandonment of the conquest for which the dauntless hero General James Wolfe had given his life.
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†101 In 1872 Disraeli made imperialism the central tenet of Conservative Party policy. He was drawn to this stance because he had realized that working-class Britons, newly enfranchised by the 1867 Reform Act, were strong supporters of the Empire, perhaps as a source of colour in their hard lives.
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*102 Cobden could lay a claim to be the father of the “Narcissism of small differences,” that practice whereby some Canadians stare intently across the border to identify differences between themselves and their neighbouring Americans. After a tour of the two countries in 1859, he proclaimed that Canadians “looked more English than those on the other side of the American frontier—they are more fleshy and have ruddier complexions.”
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*103 The accused was a runaway slave charged with murder in the United States whom the British Anti-Slavery Society was seeking to protect from being extradited from Canada.
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*104 The Times went on to comment sourly, “We put no great trust in the ‘gratitude’ of colonies.”
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†105 The earliest first-rate colonial secretary—to everyone’s amazement, and even more so because he had insisted on the portfolio—was Joseph Chamberlain—but he didn’t take office there until the post-Macdonald year of 1895.
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*106 Trollope had his finger on the public pulse. He had Phineas Finn go on to say that the British did care “that Canada not go to the States because although they don’t love the Canadians, they do hate the Americans.”
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*107 Back home, Newcastle gave a level-headed analysis of the implications of what he had said to Seward: “The injury to our own trade of burning New York and Boston would be so serious we ought to be as reluctant to do it as to destroy Liverpool and Bristol,” he reported. He added, though, “but they know we must do it if they declare war.”
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*108 A rough precedent existed in the creation of Brazil, which broke away from Portugal in 1822 and remained an independent kingdom, under Pedro I and Pedro II, until it became a republic in 1899.
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*109 A rough translation, provided by a bilingual friend, would be: “Certainly no one would have dreamed of Brown walking hand in hand with Macdonald, Cartier and Galt.”
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*110 In one article, MacDermot criticized Macdonald for failing to show any awareness of having read, among others, “the Fabians.” Since the Fabian Society was formed only in 1884, this seems a critical reach too far. In fact, the Fabian leaders Sidney and Beatrice Webb did come to Canada, in 1897, and didn’t much like what they saw: a “complete lack of thinking” about social problems in a “nation of successful speculators in land values.”
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*111 During the century and a half since, Maritime Union has remained a topic of academic interest, but of none whatever to Maritime people and politicians.
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*112 In fact, the Intercolonial enabled Canadian manufactures to capture the Maritime market from local companies. At the time Macdonald spoke, though, the Reciprocity deal with the United States had made east-west traffic incidental to the huge flow of north-south traffic.
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*113 As a consequence of the 1982 Constitution Act, the BNA Act was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.
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†114 To improve his own knowledge, Macdonald in this letter asked for a copy of a standard work, G.T. Curtis’s History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States.
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†115 In the published edition of Feo Monck’s journal, Macdonald’s name was left a discreet blank, but her original page contains the handwritten note “Macdonald afterwards Premier.”
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*116 Within a year, as the government moved to the new, permanent national capital in Ottawa, Quebec City would lose even its temporary parliament building.
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*117 The term used then was Legislative Council, but for simplicity’s sake, Senate and senators are here used throughout.
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*118 Today, the equivalent share of government spending on education, health and social programs would be around 70 per cent.
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*119 To confirm the indistinguishable interconnectedness of law and politics, of the thirty-three Fathers, two-thirds, or twenty-one, were lawyers, but, like Macdonald, lawyers who had learned the trade on the job.
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†120 The interest the delegates took in the Senate would have reached fever pitch had they known that serious consideration would be given later to granting to all the Confederation senators “the rank and title of Knight Bachelor.” Macdonald scotched this idea by pointing out to the colonial secretary that quite aside from the possibility of an errant senator lowering the tone of knighthood, it “would entail
a title on his wife, which might not in all cases be considered desirable.”
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*121 No protection was provided for French Canadians as such or for any ethnic group, Aboriginal people excepted. The protections were all to religion and to language.
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*122 This revealing letter is reproduced in full in Alastair Sweeny’s George-Étienne Cartier: A Biography.
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*123 Macdonald was exaggerating for effect. Tupper, Nova Scotia’s premier, denounced the “absurdity” of provinces claiming any sovereignty and said that Confederation would instead make Nova Scotia “a large municipality under the Central Government; but just as clearly a municipality as the City of Halifax now is under our Provincial Government.”
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†124 Brown so doubted the usefulness of provincial governments that he said they “should not take up political matters.”
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*125 A nine-foot-long oak-and-basswood table in the Saskatchewan Legislative Library at Regina may be the same one around which the Quebec City delegates bargained for the resolutions. It was used in the Privy Council at Ottawa from 1865 to some date in the 1883–92 period, when it was brought to Regina. It probably came to Ottawa from Quebec City, and so may have been used at the Confederation conference, but no certain connection has been established.
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*126 To further mollify the Americans, the Canadian government compensated the St. Albans banks for their losses with thirty thousand dollars in banknotes and forty thousand in gold.
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†127 In June 1864, the value of the Canadian dollar reached $2. 78, a peak never even approached since.
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128 In his report on the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences, published in 1865 under the title The Union of the British Provinces, the pro-Confederation Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Whelan dealt delicately with Macdonald’s performance: “Illness induced by fatigue from assiduous devotion to public affairs, compelled him to curtail his observations.”
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†129 It’s possible there was a concealed brace behind Macdonald, as was often used to enable a client to last out the minute and a half or more of motionlessness required for the exposure.
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