Whelan became a sudden and permanent convert to confederation about the time of the Charlottetown conference, and with good reason. He had found the promise of an end to the Island’s most intractable social and political problem – and also a solution to the issue that was estranging him from his restless Tenant League constituents. Even a rival newspaper, hostile to confederation, admitted that, if the new confederation could buy out the landlords, “the islanders almost to a man will hold up both hands for the union.” If confederation could end landlordism peacefully and profitably, Whelan would have a victory for parliamentary principles – and fine prospects for re-election and a return to power. No wonder the confederation proposal had restored his faith in constitutional measures.32
Whelan came from a generation that had done well by the British constitution. In the aftermath of the disastrous and counter-productive 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, reformers like him had re-dedicated themselves to change through constitutional means, and they had won. Proclaiming their absolute loyalty to the constitution, they had successfully turned the system of government inside out. The rule of appointed governors and their appointive councils had given way to the rule of legislatures elected on a broad public franchise and sympathetic to vigorous state initiatives.
In defeat and opposition in the early 1860s, Whelan’s constitutional faith had wavered. The Tenant League’s adoption of extralegal means, however, drew Whelan back to his fundamental faith that constitutional means were, both tactically and as matters of principle, the right ones. In September 1864, confederation looked to Whelan a fresh step in constitutional reform. It promised not only a glorious transcontinental destiny but also an end to landlordism, the last vestige of the bad old days that still lingered in Prince Edward Island. As the Queen Victoria ploughed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the next great reform triumph must have seemed to lie just over the horizon.
Quebec delivered a shattering disappointment to those hopes. In the Island delegation, Coles and Whelan, espousing liberal principles, sat with landowners like Edward Palmer and Heath Haviland, who were deeply suspicious of any change that might threaten their standing. Even though they fought bitterly amongst themselves, both groups asserted the rights of Islanders against central authority. The Island delegates quickly became the most obstreperous critics of the plan the Canadian delegates were putting forward. Demanding provincial equality in the Senate and more seats in the House, the Islanders challenged the rep-by-pop deal by which the Canadians had agreed on a federal union.
The Canadians began to denounce Island arguments as the complaints of greedy malcontents. And suddenly the proposal to buy out the Island’s landlords vanished from the confederation agenda. Possibly the Islanders’ demands had irritated the Canadians into closing the purse strings. Perhaps a dawning recognition that the Canadians were not going to live up to the land commitment made at Charlottetown helped ignite the hostility of the Islanders. Whatever the case, the Canadians would not budge on the land question. Support for confederation evaporated in the Island delegation. A land purchase, said Andrew Macdonald, was the only advantage he could see in confederation, but the motion that he and Coles put was not even included in the minutes of the meeting. The Islanders voted, often alone, against one resolution after another, and Whelan seems to have voted with the Island majority.
By the time the delegations returned to Prince Edward Island, George Coles, the leader of Whelan’s party, had changed course dramatically. Since Charlottetown, he had favoured confederation as the way to end landlordism. When confederation failed to deliver, he made common cause against it with Edward Palmer, who had always resisted both it and any challenge to landlords’ rights. In rejecting confederation, Coles had made an astute political calculation. With the tempting prospect of an end to landlordism snatched away, the tough take-it-or-leave-it offer of confederation seemed mostly an affront to Island pride and self-sufficiency. Mass meetings across the Island condemned the idea of confederation. By an overwhelming majority, the legislature in Charlottetown instructed the government to have nothing to do with colonial union of any kind. In a couple of years, Coles would ride the anti-confederate crusade back to the premier’s office.
Edward Whelan would come back into office with Coles, but Whelan had not repudiated confederation. Although he had voted against many of the resolutions at Quebec, he told the Island legislature, “we got what I think should be accepted as a compromise.” At Quebec he had been fascinated by glimpses of the complex, diverse political world that confederation would create. He had caught the national vision, and he began to make disparaging jokes about “this patch of sandbank in the St. Lawrence.” He also seems to have calculated that federal union and the removal of Colonial Office interference would quickly make landlordism extinct, whether the money was provided or not. All through 1865, 1866, and 1867, he stood among the tiny, unpopular minority of Island confederates.33
Whelan, of course, held no sinecure post. He had to win his seat in every election, and, in 1867, the unpopularity of his views caught up with him. Anti-confederates resented his support for union. Tenant League supporters resented his refusal to support them. The bishop of Charlottetown and the local priest resented his blunt declarations that clerics ought to stay out of politics. The Irish community, Whelan’s core constituency, shared all three resentments. Whelan lost a by-election in the spring of 1867 and was out of politics when confederation went ahead on July 1 without Prince Edward Island. He was dead before the end of the year, not yet forty-four.
Even serious historians have been tempted into suggesting that Whelan died of a broken heart, a kind of martyr for the confederation cause. Surely this is nonsense. Whelan was a seasoned political pro. He would hardly have pined away over a by-election, and his confidence that Prince Edward Island would soon embrace confederation had not wavered. “He was a fast liver,” said one of his reporters in an obituary, and photographs of Whelan suggest the beefy, thick-necked look of a man who worked too hard, ate too much, and drank too often. Almost certainly he died of these enthusiasms, and not from heartbreak.*
Whelan’s legacy seemed small. Edward Palmer once accused him of saying little during the Quebec conference because he was too busy making notes of the proceedings. Whelan admitted as much, but if he intended to make his fortune with a book about confederation, he never got the chance. All he produced was a small compilation of speeches from the conference banquets, “a very humble and unpretending affair,” in his own words. It cost him £150 to print, “and I haven’t received a shilling for it yet,” he told a friend. The larger book, if there was one, never appeared. Whatever notes he kept at Quebec were probably lost with all his papers in a house fire a few years after his death. His only surviving child drowned in 1875.34
Even his political predictions mostly went awry. He thought confederation would end landlordism, while Tenant League actions threatened only disaster and defeat. Instead, the tenants broke the landlords themselves. Whelan expected the landlords would invoke the law to smash the illegal resistance with armed force. But in face of the rent strike, it was the landlords who wavered. Leading landlords soon declared themselves ready to sell out to the tenants, and a wave of purchases eroded the great estates. Once they themselves became landowners, Island farmers shed their radicalism – but it had been the threat of forcible resistance, not Whelan’s parliamentary tactics, that had won their fight.
Whelan also predicted that Prince Edward Island would soon beg to be allowed into confederation. Reckless investments in railways did force the Island to seek terms, but by 1873 Canada was at least as eager as the Islanders to complete the union. Prince Edward Island persuaded Ottawa to guarantee six Commons seats, two hundred miles of railways, permanent communications with the mainland, and generous financial terms. There was a large grant to complete the buying out of the landlords, and in 1874 Prince Edward Island began the expropriations of large estates that Whelan had advocated twenty-five year
s before. Terms less generous than these would have secured the support of the Island’s delegation, and perhaps the Islanders as well, in 1864. Governor General Lord Dufferin, officially visiting the new province in 1873, wrote Prime Minister Macdonald that Islanders were “quite under the impression that it is the dominion that has been annexed to Prince Edward Island, and in alluding to the subject I have adopted the same tone.”35
Did Edward Whelan’s support of an unpopular confederation and his condemnation of the radical Tenant League prove he had betrayed the humbler classes and gone conservative? Had he begun to endorse the authority of a parliamentary élite over the wishes of the people? Hardly. Just after the Quebec conference, he declared he would defer “reverently” to public opinion, since the issue of confederation had to be put to the public. Confederation could only be ratified, he said, in “the several local legislatures, the constituencies of each province in public meetings assembled, and at the hustings.” When the Island legislature declared in 1866 that it would never accept confederation on any terms, Whelan offered a lonely dissent: it would be up to the people to accept or reject confederation, and if they eventually accepted it, no legislative veto should stop them.36
Whelan’s commitment to both democracy and confederation, his insistence that confederation was both right for his province and the right way for “the humbler classes of society” to fight the landocracy, suggests the underlying radicalism that still attended the idea of responsible government. Responsible government and parliamentary democracy had been reform causes in British North America; it was only by yielding to them that conservative politicians had surged back to power in the 1850s and 1860s. But Whelan still expected parliamentary democracy and confederation to change the world, not to conserve it. That enduring activist strain confirms what a flexible instrument the British constitution still seemed in the 1860s. The other confederation-makers, whatever their goals, were more like him than not in their eagerness to use parliamentary government to do things, not to prevent them.
During one of the Sunday breaks of the Quebec conference, Edward Whelan found a few moments to visit the monuments and battlefields of the city. He told his readers he was still “nearly a stranger to the historic places in this old city,” but he hoped to have a chance to remedy that before leaving Quebec. Edmund Burke, also a lover of history and tradition, might have shared Whelan’s eagerness to explore the ramparts and ancient landmarks of Quebec. We can imagine the two of them haunting the sites of the Quebec conference like quarrelsome ghosts, deeply in harmony over the value of parliamentary government, deeply divided on the uses of the state.37
Burke’s warnings against all kinds of state activism were largely unheeded in Whelan’s day. Burke, who thought the governments of his day had no business either feeding the poor or funding the colonization of Nova Scotia, would have been appalled by Whelan’s enthusiasm for using the Canadian state to expropriate private property in Prince Edward Island and to build railways across the continent. In the late twentieth century, however, echoes of these ideas of Burke’s once more reverberated loudly. Few modern “neo-conservatives” were quite so explicit about the necessity of letting the poor starve, but Burke’s insistence that the state must not try to change the society it served was alive and walking the corridors of power in the 1990s.
Parliamentary government, however, the idea on which Burke and Whelan were in harmony, commanded very little reverence in late-twentieth-century Canada. In the 1990s, not even parliamentarians gave more than lip service to the notion that a parliamentary seat was, or should be, a significant and important office. Sadly, it was where Burke and Whelan were most compatible – in believing that parliamentary government was a legitimate and effective way to resist arbitrary authority and to articulate the will of the nation – that the legacy of both had become most wraithlike and insubstantial.
* Circumspect accounts of unexpected deaths in Victorian times invite speculation about either alcoholism or syphilis, but Whelan’s decline seems too rapid to suggest either. George Coles became insane within a year of regaining office in 1867, and died insane in 1875, aged sixty-five. That Coles, by all reports a solid, respectable, bourgeois paterfamilias, may have been one of the classic gentlemanly victims of Victorian syphilis seems impossible to confirm but cannot be ruled out.
CHAPTER FOUR
Under the Confederation Windows
THE HOSTS OF the Quebec conference hoped the old city and its spectacular site would welcome the visitors with a Laurentian fall to match the Island summer that Charlottetown had provided so lavishly in September. But before the delegates arrived, Quebec City’s blazing autumn colours were whirled away in an early snowstorm. Mercy Ann Coles, who came from Prince Edward Island with her father, the ex-premier, would grumble to her diary about watching endless rain pound down on the roof outside her hotel window. Nevertheless, Quebec City could glitter even in the rain. With its viceregal court and its military garrison, in an era when the court and the officer corps were the acme of society, Quebec offered unparalleled conditions for dignified celebration.1
The liveliest descriptions of the Quebec conference’s ceremonial side come from women. Frances Monck, the governor general’s niece, who had left her baby in Ireland to visit Quebec, met many of those who had come “to arrange about a united kingdom of Canada.” In the diary she kept, she generally approved of what she saw of the conference, looking with amused toleration even upon the Catholic clergy’s edict against intimate dancing. Charles Tupper she found forward in his courtesies. George-Étienne Cartier struck her as “the funniest of little men,” always lively and amusing, and apt to break into song after dinner. She thought George Brown handsome and D’Arcy McGee remarkably ugly. During one conference dinner, Edward Chandler of New Brunswick told her “a great deal about the happiness of slaves, and how miserable they are when emancipated.”2
Frances Monck assessed the ceremonial side of the conference with the detachment of one long used to the elegant entertainments of the British aristocracy. Mercy Coles, one of many delegates’ wives and daughters who came along to Quebec, was better placed to express a colonial view of the conference. She had grown up in the small town of Charlottetown, in the home of a successful middle-class brewer who also happened to be premier. Neither Mercy nor her father would have got in the door of English society of the kind Frances Monck knew, but George Brown had been much taken with the Coles women when he met them in Charlottetown. As soon as the Coles family settled at the Hotel St. Louis (“a very nice hotel and every comfort one can wish for”), Mercy was surrounded by ministerial admirers from Charlottetown – not only Mr. Brown, but also Cartier, Macdonald, and McGee. “Major Bernard tells me we are to have grand times,” she wrote the night she arrived. “The first word almost he said was ‘I hope you brought the irresistible blue silk.’ ” She had.
In her diary Mercy Coles seemed oblivious to the conference itself, which she could not attend and about which her father seems to have told her little. Constrained by mid-Victorian ideas about a woman’s role, she shopped with a daughter of Upper Canadian delegate William McDougall and gossiped about the daughters of New Brunswickers Steeves and Fisher (“The Misses Steeves seem to be possessors of the parlour downstairs. I think they never leave it. There is a Mr Carver who seems to be the great attraction. He is a beau of Miss Fisher’s but they monopolize him”). She saw the sights around Quebec in a party led by Premier Gray, whose invalid wife was home in Charlottetown with barely a month to live. She even put up with bad behaviour from D’Arcy McGee (“Before dinner was half over he got so drunk he was obliged to leave the table. I took no notice of him. Mr Gray said I acted admirably”).
At the end of the first week of the conference, Mercy Coles fell ill; indeed, she may have had diphtheria. After Colonel Gray’s homeopathic remedies failed, her parents called in Dr. Tupper, and Tupper attended to her before and after conference sessions for ten days (“Dr Tupper came in and found me out of bed sta
nding in my bare feet. Get into bed this minute, he said, you want to catch your death of cold. I tumbled in pretty quickly, he felt my pulse and looked into my mouth and said you are a good deal better”). In her sickbed, Mercy Coles missed most of the great balls and dinners of the Quebec conference and had to content herself with collecting the photographic visiting cards of the delegates (“Mr Tilley gave me such a nice card of himself. All the gentlemen have been having their likenesses taken. Papa’s is only tolerable”). When she was able to dine in company again, she was delighted by the kind inquiries of John A. “The conundrum!” she wrote as Macdonald, trying to draw George Coles away from his deepening disaffection from the Quebec plan, courted his family.
Edward Whelan was another admiring observer of the social whirl attending the Quebec conference. “If the delegates will survive the lavish hospitality of this great country, they will have good constitutions – perhaps better than the one they are manufacturing for the confederation,” he wrote home. Whelan had argued against secrecy in the conference, but felt bound by the rules. In the reports he sent his newspaper in Charlottetown, he was circumspect about the decisions being made.3 Instead he described every dinner and ball. Whelan even hinted that the intercourse of Maritimers and Canadians was not restricted to dancing and dining. In an afterdinner speech at the end of the conference, he paid tribute to the way the Maritime delegates had been “caressed” by their hosts. “This was not intended to apply to the fair ladies of Canada,” he said to appreciative laughter. “For the delegates all being married men were, of course, like Caesar’s wife – above suspicion.” Perhaps Whelan had special targets among his fellow delegates as he went on, “If not so circumstanced, they would be as dead as Julius Caesar long ago!” Whelan had left his own wife at home.4
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