CHAPTER SIX
Leonard Tilley and the Voters
IN 1987, after eleven first ministers had spent a couple of days negotiating the Meech Lake accord, Premier Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick returned home and called a general election before the accord had been ratified by his provincial legislature. Hatfield and his party suffered a disastrous defeat, and the Meech Lake accord never recovered.
In 1864, after thirty-three bipartisan delegates had spent almost three weeks negotiating the Quebec resolutions, Premier Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick returned home and called a general election before the resolutions had been ratified by his provincial legislature. Tilley and his party suffered a disastrous defeat, and …
The script changes here. Despite the defeat of Tilley’s government, confederation survived to be ratified in New Brunswick a year later. Tilley returned triumphantly to power in a second election, and the constitutional process of the 1860s culminated in the passage and gradual acceptance of the British North America Act. Tilley had made himself the only Canadian politician who has ever faced the voters twice on constitutional issues and survived. Since “everyone knows” that the nineteenth-century makers of confederation excluded the public from Canada’s constitution, Tilley’s experience opens a window on the relations between politicians and voters in the confederation process.
Leonard Tilley has dropped almost completely off the radar screen of Canadian history. The only substantial study of his career is twenty-five years old, an unpublished and almost unavailable academic thesis.1 Standard texts in Canadian history refer to him routinely as “Samuel Leonard Tilley,” though he never used his first name. Even more completely than the other key makers of confederation, Tilley has become almost entirely faceless.
Tilley was hard to make interesting. He had a genial style, but was not witty, drunken, or flirtatious. A widower, he was the devoted single father of seven children, a steady, churchgoing, evangelical Christian, who taught Sunday school and had made his living running a drugstore. As a politician, he was more an administrator than a leader or a crowd-pleaser. He never became prime minister. Even his enthusiasms were muted. Early in his career, Tilley was best known as a crusader against alcohol, but even as Most Worthy Patriarch of the North American Sons of Temperance, he was unfanatical. He went through all the confederation dinners without touching the champagne, but he never complained about its presence either.
At the end of his life, when he was Lieutenant-Governor Sir Leonard Tilley, with fifty years of political success behind him, eulogists would emphasize his United Empire Loyalist origins. But Tilley was never one of the gentlemanly office-holders from the old colonial élite who kept the loyalist flame in New Brunswick. He rarely mentioned his antecedents, who had been part of the anonymous rank and file of the American refugee migration into New Brunswick. The son of small shopkeepers in the Saint John River valley community of Gagetown, Tilley at thirteen moved to Saint John as pharmacist’s apprentice. At twenty he was a partner in a successful retail drugstore there, and he soon moved into local politics.*
His politics reflected his origins. Tilley was another of the heirs of responsible government. He helped achieve the rule of Parliament in New Brunswick in 1854, and it helped him to rise from nowhere to domination of the province. Tilley was for reform: a secret ballot and an expanded voters’ list, more public education, businesslike administration of government, economic development. As a key cabinet minister in the government of Charles Fisher, Tilley delivered on much of that agenda. Tilley was also for temperance when it was a great and highly controversial issue. In fact, his attempt to legislate prohibition in New Brunswick brought down the Fisher government in the infamous “Rummies” and “Smashers” campaign of 1856. Tilley learned a lasting lesson about electoral politics. “Our legislature was at that time in advance of public sentiment,” he said later. When the reformers returned to power, Tilley became more cautious about legislating his own enthusiasms.2
Responsible government had vastly expanded the powers of cabinet government, and Tilley rose on his ability to shoulder the burden. He mastered the details and understood the finances, and he dominated cabinet sessions. He also kept his elbows up. In the schism-prone party politics of mid-century New Brunswick, he made enemies in his own caucus as often as beyond it, but he was rarely outmanoeuvred. In 1861, when Premier Fisher became tangled in a scandal, Tilley ruthlessly organized his removal from cabinet and took over himself. Soon after, the voters gave the reformers a comfortable majority, which was still supporting Premier Tilley in 1864, when he led New Brunswick’s delegations into the discussions of Maritime union and then of confederation. (Fisher, who had remained in politics, was one of the delegates with him at Quebec.)
In all the provinces, legislatures normally met for a month or two early in each calendar year. The plan at Quebec had been to have the Quebec resolutions approved at Quebec, Fredericton, Halifax, Charlottetown, and St. John’s, Newfoundland, early in 1865. The Imperial Parliament would then receive what it wanted: simultaneous requests from the provinces to have British North America united on terms negotiated by colonists and approved by their legislatures. On that timetable, the new nation might have come into being late in 1865 or early in 1866. Leonard Tilley’s New Brunswick election determined it would not happen so fast.
Tilley knew as soon as he came home from Quebec that confederation would be a hard sell in New Brunswick. He personally had put aside his own earlier suspicion that, in a British North American union, “we of the lower provinces would be placed in a less favourable position than we now occupy.” But many of his compatriots still held precisely that view. As soon as the Quebec plan was published, opposition erupted. “The storm that burst upon the delegates from New Brunswick was like the hurricane of the tropics,” wrote Tilley’s fellow delegate John Gray. Tilley soon saw that the New Brunswick assembly, which had been elected in 1861 and would have to face the voters in 1865, was unlikely to approve the Quebec resolutions.3
From the perspective of the 1990s, Leonard Tilley’s inability to have confederation approved in the New Brunswick legislature requires some explanation. Tilley was the undisputed leader of a government with a solid majority, and on the Quebec resolutions he had the support of leading opposition members. In those circumstances, modern premiers and party leaders would simply instruct their backbenchers, and the thing would be done. By late-twentieth-century standards, only remarkable carelessness – or an equally remarkable scrupulousness about consulting the people – would cause an incumbent premier to call an election with such crucial business unfinished. We need not attribute either carelessness or scruples to Tilley, however. He did not choose to have an election. His hand was forced.
In Halifax, Charles Tupper was aghast at the election talk in New Brunswick. “I hope you will assist me in pressing Tilley to push it through without going first to the people,” he had just written to John A. Macdonald. Macdonald seemed to share Tupper’s opinion. “It shakes one’s opinion of Tilley’s statesmanship,” he wrote when he heard the election commitment had been made.4
It is easy to assume that Macdonald was angry because he had been counting on Tilley to ram confederation through the legislature against the will of the population, leaving the frustrated opposition impotent to stop it. In that circumstance, so familiar from late-twentieth-century Canadian politics, one would assume that the government’s rivals would be delighted to see Tilley playing into their hands by calling an election. Oddly enough, however, the New Brunswick opposition shared Macdonald’s view of Tilley’s action.
At the end of 1864, Albert Smith led the opposition to Tilley in the New Brunswick legislature. Smith was a long-time reform champion, more radical than Tilley on most issues, and particularly set against taxpayer subsidies to railway corporations. He had been Tilley’s attorney-general until 1862, but he had objected to Tilley’s generosity to railway promoters and had left the cabinet. Confederation confirmed their rivalry. S
mith, who abominated Maritime union, had refused to be a delegate to the Charlottetown conference, and he proved equally hostile to the larger union negotiated at Quebec. Since the leading conservative politicians had joined the confederation movement, Smith became the effective leader of opposition to the Quebec resolutions in New Brunswick. He weighed in against them with all his characteristic fervour – but he did not want a snap election.
Since it was generally agreed that opposition to confederation was widespread and growing, an Albert Smith with the instincts of the 1990s would have been invoking the rights of the people and demanding the election that could put him in power. Smith did not see it that way. Instead of pressing for the election, he called Tilley’s decision to call one “an act of tyranny.”5
The explanation for the actions of both Tilley and Smith lies in the way Canadian politics worked under responsible government in the nineteenth century. John A. Macdonald had not, in fact, assumed that Tilley could ram confederation through a tame legislature. When he urged Tilley to meet the legislature, Macdonald knew the outcome would be uncertain. “Tilley should have called his parliament together and, in accordance with the agreement of the conference at Quebec, submitted the scheme,” he wrote after Tilley had gone down to defeat. “Whatever might have been the result in the legislature, the subject would have been fairly discussed and its merits understood, and if he had been defeated, he then had an appeal to the people. As it was, the scheme was submitted without its being understood or appreciated, and the inevitable consequences followed.”6
Macdonald was making the argument (the amazing argument, by late-twentieth-century standards) that legislative debate mattered. Albert Smith, from the opposite side of the confederation issue, believed the same thing. Both denounced the snap election, because it pre-empted the legislative debate. Both asserted that an important public issue should be debated in Parliament, no matter what the outcome. Macdonald did not urge Tilley to use his control of a compliant legislative majority to impose his policy on an unwilling province. He argued instead that the legislature was the best place from which to convince the population. Albert Smith denounced the election call for the same reason, because he calculated the opposition forces could win over the legislature by force of argument – and increase their electability by doing so.
Tilley’s decision to dissolve the legislature depended less on his own calculation, however, than on the reaction of his cabinet and caucus. In the 1860s, as today, government policy required the support of a legislative majority. In the 1860s, however, party policy was subject to the approval of the party caucus. Tilley quickly found neither his ministers nor his backbenchers ready to give confederation the automatic and docile support a modern party leader expects. He had a hard fight with his cabinet over confederation, and one of his ministers, George Hatheway, resigned to join Albert Smith. It was worse in caucus. Many of the reform members who had kept Tilley in power since 1861 refused to endorse the Quebec resolutions.
John Gray, the one-time “weathercock” who had become the strongest supporter of confederation among the conservatives, was also running into dissent in his caucus. Even his fellow delegate Edward Chandler had reservations about the Quebec terms. With revolt brewing in both the government and the opposition caucuses, confederation’s supporters simply lacked the votes to carry it through the legislature. Tilley could either fight and lose in the legislature and be forced to call an election, or he could dissolve the legislature immediately and debate the issue on the hustings instead, where the outcome was less predictable. With his caucus support dissolving, he preferred an election to humiliation in the House, and he agreed to postpone all action on the Quebec resolutions until after the election. By mid-November, Tilley and Smith were busy meeting the people.*
More precisely, they were meeting those people who had a vote. Something close to universal male suffrage prevailed in New Brunswick in 1864, and it was little different in most of the other British North American provinces, despite the widely held notion that there was no little or no democracy in the mid-nineteenth-century colonies. As early as 1810, Sir James Craig, a governor of Lower Canada whose usual inclination was to throw critics of his policies into jail, had complained bitterly that “scarcely one farmer in a thousand” was without a vote in that colony, while in 1832 the assembly he had fought with celebrated the fact that the right of voting remained “nearly universal.”7
When the first legislative assemblies were called in the British North American colonies, a radical choice had been required: either let almost all men vote or let almost none. The choice hinged on the amount of property that a voter would be required to own. Most colonial families owned property, but most were frontier farmers, whose properties had infinitesimal cash value. Setting any significant level of property ownership as a requirement for voting would disenfranchise almost everyone. Instead, a low requirement – “the forty-shilling freehold” – gave a vote to almost every household. Even the tenant farmers on the seigneuries of Quebec and the estates of Prince Edward Island got the vote. By the 1830s, with formal discrimination against Catholic, Jewish, and Quaker voters abolished, male property owners nearly all had the vote.
By the 1850s, the achievement of responsible government meant legislatures with genuine authority over the internal affairs of British North America were elected by an electorate as wide as any in the world. Britain still had a very limited franchise, and few European countries were democracies. The United States had adopted the principle of universal manhood suffrage in 1845, but many groups, most notably the slaves, remained disenfranchised, and significant limits to voter power remained. At confederation, United States senators were appointed by state governments, not elected. As late as 1877, Congress installed a president who had been soundly defeated in the popular vote.
Most British North American colonies still required voters to own a token amount of property, and thereby excluded transients, hired men, and adult sons living at home (though policing of the polls to prevent them from voting was very haphazard). In practice, the right of voting for members of the assembly was not far short of universal for males in most of British North America. In Canada East, where poverty and dislocation of the kind Brother André experienced in his youth had disenfranchised a growing number of men, the proportion had fallen as low as 70 per cent by the 1860s, and opponents of Nova Scotia’s decision to restore a property requirement in that decade claimed that as many as a quarter of voters there might lose their vote. Even those colonies, however, still allowed more men to vote than most countries, and the other British North American colonies were even closer to universal male suffrage.
Oddly enough, it was reformers, the advocates of responsible government and a broad franchise, who were most reluctant to remove the last vestiges of a property requirement. The vote was nearly sacred to reformers; they resisted giving it to those who, they felt, neither earned it nor cared how they exercised it. In 1855, Tilley’s reform colleague Charles Fisher had argued, even as he widened the franchise, that allowing every man to vote would give too much power “to money and multitude.”8 It would enable the rich to cancel out middle-class votes, he said, by buying the votes of desperate poor people.
For the same reason, the great reform crusader Joseph Howe had brought back a property requirement in Nova Scotia after a conservative government had eliminated it. If a county with 5,000 voters had 2,400 men on each side of an issue, said Howe, the balance would be tipped by two hundred impoverished and apolitical voters, who only wished elections were more common so they could sell their vote more often. It was the reformers’ faith in the vote that impelled them to keep access to it from being too easy. George Brown defended token limits to exclude the unconcerned and uncommitted, but he was not far wrong when he declared that everyone in Canada West who seriously wanted a vote could have one, and it was much the same in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
Everyone male, that is. Women could not vote. The proper
ty requirement eliminated most of them, and when it was noticed in the 1830s that some women who had property were voting, the colonies enacted laws to disenfranchise all women. Men and women were considered different by nature and destined for different realms: women for the domestic sphere, men for public life. In the reign of Queen Victoria, middle-class men increasingly expected to support their wives and dependents at home, while they monopolized “public” life. The doctrine of “separate spheres,” which disenfranchised women, was getting stronger in the 1860s.
In some ways, the conviction that men and women occupied separate spheres could empower women. Nurturing the young was women’s role, and so women could claim substantial influence over education and charitable work. As public schools expanded, women came to dominate the teaching profession throughout British North America. (Leonard Tilley had met his wife when they were Sunday-school teachers together.) Defending and raising society’s moral standards was also women’s domain. Since the boundary between moral suasion and public campaigning was hard to define, women’s moral role sometimes enabled them to enter directly into political activity.
Temperance, a moral issue that became a political crusade, had drawn thousands of New Brunswick women into politics in the 1850s. As a temperance campaigner, Leonard Tilley had long worked closely with women who organized meetings, spoke, marched, and gathered petition signatures in tens of thousands. George Hatheway, the politician who quit Tilley’s cabinet in opposition to confederation, said it was crucial for a politician to have “the good opinion of the fair portion of the community.” He claimed he “would rather have one lady canvasser than a dozen men.”9
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