In April 1866 and again in March 1867, Nova Scotia ratified confederation because a substantial majority of its elected representatives wanted it so. Had they all been bought?
Anti-confederates insisted they had been. They launched a furious assault against the “thirty-one traitors” who had sold their country “at black midnight,” and their accusation would long endure. William Miller, who did receive a Senate appointment in 1867 (along with Robert Dickey, John Bourinot, and other crucial vote-changers), sued the Morning Chronicle in 1874 over the allegation that he had sold his vote. Even Tupper’s respectful 1916 biographer declared, “it is not necessary to dwell upon the methods by which Dr. Tupper got a majority, [or] to affirm that all these influences were addressed solely to the judgment and conscience of the men with whom he was dealing.” Many historians of confederation have readily assumed that, given the endemic corruption of Maritime politics, bribery must have determined the outcome.36
Closer analysis, however, has demolished the notion that confederation was ratified in Nova Scotia simply by bribery. Money and promises were important in elections, but corruption was not the basis of Maritime politics in the 1860s. Whatever side they were on, politicians hoped to be remembered if their side won, but, on an issue as divisive as confederation, no one could predict the winning side at the time Miller and the others decided the need for union overrode their dislike of the Quebec terms. Resistance to – and support for – the confederation plan in Atlantic Canada was rooted in both principles and practicalities. “No external pressure,” wrote the Maritime historian Phillip Buckner in an influential 1990 re-examination of the issue, “could have compelled the Maritimes to join confederation if, ultimately, they had not been convinced that it was in their own interests to do so.” It seems fair to conclude that the Nova Scotia legislature ratified confederation in Nova Scotia because most of its members believed it was the right decision and that it was their right and duty to decide.37
Their answer was orthodox by all the rules of parliamentary representation. The pro-confederates stood on solid ground when they insisted they were following the legitimate working of representative government under a parliamentary constitution. John A. Macdonald had said it eloquently in the Canadian House, in arguing down an election proposal from ultra-tory John Hillyard Cameron, “If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here. But if we do represent them, we have a right to see for them, to think for them, to act for them; we have the right to go to the foot of the throne and declare that we believe it to be for the peace, order, and good government of Canada to form of these provinces one empire, presenting an unbroken and undaunted front to every foe, and if we do not think we have this right, we are unworthy of the commission we have received from the people of Canada.”38
To an uncomprehending twentieth century, where legislators bound by party discipline never made up their own minds and parliamentary debate was an empty ritual, such arguments came down like light from a dead star. But the legislators of Nova Scotia, in a parliamentary regime where the government really was responsible to a legislature capable of independent decisions, had hold of a great truth.
But Joseph Howe had hold of a great truth, too. Confederation had raised a problem without a simple answer: at what point does a representative mandate give way to the need to seek the verdict of the people? Even if it were not the doom of Nova Scotia (as one anti-confederate cried out in the House), confederation proposed a fundamental and controversial change in the province’s circumstances. Whatever the justifications, Tupper had erred in treating it as if it were a problem to be managed by parliamentary debate and parliamentary guile. His eighteen months of manoeuvres towards a pro-confederate vote in the House may have had constitutional sanction, but to many Nova Scotia voters they looked like trickery more than honest representation.
Nova Scotia finally went to the polls two months after confederation, in September 1867. The results were spectacular. Tupper was the only supporter of confederation among nineteen members sent to Ottawa. In the simultaneous provincial election, anti-confederates took thirty-six of the thirty-eight seats. Nova Scotia was perhaps not quite so unanimous against confederation as those results suggested. Many races had been closely contested, and confederates held up to 40 per cent of the popular vote. But almost every single member who had argued so firmly that it was up to the legislature to decide on confederation lost his seat.
What the elections may have shown most conclusively was Nova Scotian voters’ resentment at not being entrusted with the decision on confederation. With the decision kept out of their hands until it was too late to make a difference, the voters eagerly punished those who had prevented them from expressing an opinion. The members who ratified confederation in Nova Scotia discovered that they had committed the rarest act of independent legislators. They had committed political suicide for the sake of a measure in which they believed.
In the years that followed, many of the “antis” of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick accommodated themselves to confederation. “Better terms” had been the demand of many Nova Scotians, and better terms for Nova Scotia became a political necessity immediately after confederation. “There is no use crying peace when there is no peace,” was Leonard Tilley’s perceptive advice, and Prime Minister Macdonald finally agreed to negotiate better financial terms for Nova Scotia. In doing so, Macdonald won over Joseph Howe himself. Shelving his argument that only the mandate of a general election could legitimize the union, Howe joined the federal cabinet in 1868.
William Annand, who became premier of Nova Scotia, continued to resist confederation, even at the price of estrangement from Howe, his lifelong mentor. As Howe had pointed out, however, the anti-confederates could have paralysed Nova Scotia’s government in 1867 by refusing to accept office under a lieutenant-governor appointed by Ottawa. Premier Annand was not willing to go that far. Other prominent anti-confederates made their own accommodations. Archibald McLelan went to Ottawa with Howe in 1868 and received a seat in the federal cabinet. Thomas Killam, one of the Yarmouth members who had considered annexation to the United States better than confederation, became one of many Nova Scotian anti-confederates who, like the Quebec rouges, eventually became provincial-rights federalists. Killam eventually became a Ottawa cabinet minister, as did his Shelburne counterpart Thomas Coffin.
But the resentment persisted. The historian Peter Waite reports the case of Nova Scotia Premier W. S. Fielding, who, when visiting London in 1892, refused to attend a dinner marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of confederation. Even Fielding was a future federal cabinet minister, but the conviction that Nova Scotians had became Canadians against their will remained deeply rooted and hard to refute. The thirty-one Nova Scotian legislators of April 18, 1866, may have been perfectly sincere, but their action was remembered, and execrated, as an effort to negate the will of the province. Charles Tupper would remain a political powerhouse for another thirty years, and he was always able to cite sound constitutional arguments for the course he had taken in 1866, but on this issue his reputation would never entirely recover. By avoiding an election, he had left a permanent scar over Nova Scotia’s entry into confederation.
Leonard Tilley had not actually wanted either of New Brunswick’s two confederation elections, but he had been more willing than Tupper to let the voters sort out the crisis of confederation. Tilley accepted a shattering defeat in one election and organized an even larger triumph in the second. He got little credit for his willingness to accept the verdict of the voters – New Brunswick’s black legend, that Tilley bought the second election, matched Nova Scotia’s black legend, that the legislature’s decision to hold no elections was a crime. But in the aftermath, it was Tupper’s statesmanship, not Tilley’s, that was questionable. Tilley could claim that, in New Brunswick at least, the union had been negotiated by a bipartisan delegation, ratified by an independent legislature, and endorsed by the voters as well. Tupper only had two out of three.*
Historians and political scientists have consistently declared that the makers of confederation were not democrats. They can cite George-Étienne Cartier telling the Canadian legislature that the Americans had “founded federation for the purpose of carrying out democracy on this continent, but we … felt convinced that purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations.” They can cite George Brown condemning universal male suffrage as “evil” or John A. Macdonald urging the Quebec conference to lay the groundwork for “constitutional liberty as opposed to democracy.”39
These seem like damning admissions. If they meant nineteenth-century Canadian politicians were an autocratic élite who hated and feared the electorate and concocted schemes to exempt themselves from responsibility, then we should dismiss the legacy of confederation. But Cartier, who equated “democracy” to “mob rule,” fought every election of his political career under conditions not far short of universal male suffrage. He never held a safe seat and lost almost as many elections as he won. George Brown, insisting on the principle of a propertied franchise, meant one which in practice provided votes for virtually all men. When Macdonald spoke against “democracy,” he usually evoked the spectre of a president elected by a simple majority and thereafter wielding despotic authority unfettered by legislative review.
The “constitutional liberty” that Macdonald, and in effect all the confederation-makers, distinguished from “democracy,” was itself hardly distinguishable from what we would call parliamentary democracy. As the experience of Leonard Tilley shows, the governments of the confederation-makers were closely answerable to broadly representative and strikingly independent legislatures, whose members’ seats depended on the votes of a broad, lively, and engaged electorate. To dismiss that is to dismiss parliamentary democracy itself.
Leonard Tilley may never have been so dull as he seemed. At the London conference, one flash of personality preserved for him some place in Canadian memory. When an appropriate title and motto were being sought for the new nation, Tilley, the devout evangelical, remembered a phrase that had probably popped up in his Bible-reading during the years of debate: “And he shall have dominion from sea even unto sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.” Tilley’s contribution of the title “dominion” was not recorded until fifty years after confederation, but the story seems to be authentic.40
Three months after confederation, after five years as a widower, Tilley married Alice Chipman, the daughter of a friend. They were married almost thirty years. Several of his children migrated westward in the new nation. His son Harrison Tilley became a prominent Anglican clergyman in Toronto, and his daughters migrated to Manitoba and British Columbia. Tilley himself, the reformer drifting towards the centre, became a powerful minister in John A. Macdonald’s Ottawa, probably the most skilful finance minister Canada had in the nineteenth century. Still a believer in state activism, he drafted much of the “National Policy” that became Macdonald’s flagship in his later years. He ended his career in the 1890s as lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, and Macdonald kept him in the office when he was too ill to discharge it very effectively, because the Tilleys could not live on his pension. Money had flowed generously in New Brunswick politics throughout his career, but apparently not into Leonard Tilley’s pocket.
* The most famous statement of loyalist pathos – “I climbed to the top of Chipman’s Hill and watched the sails disappearing in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came over me that, although I had not shed a tear through all the war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and cried” – was attributed to Leonard Tilley’s great-grandmother by loyalist historian W. O. Raymond. Tilley never mentioned it, or her, to his authorized biographer.
* Tilley later claimed Lieutenant-Governor Gordon forced the election on him, and that interpretation has often been repeated. Carl Wallace, however, in “Sir Leonard Tilley,” authoritatively discounts Gordon’s influence and explains why Tilley made the claim.
* Despite its sacred status in the twentieth century, the secret ballot became largely theoretical once the buying of individual votes became uneconomic. Today, survey researchers and canvassers expect to predict consumer and voter preferences within three percentage points, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
* Tupper and Tilley might point out that the Meech Lake accord and other late-twentieth-century constitutional initiatives met none of these criteria.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Leadership Secrets of John A. Macdonald
ROBERT DICKEY, the lawyer and businessman from Charles Tupper’s home town of Amherst, had been government leader in Nova Scotia’s upper house and a delegate to both the Charlotte-town and Quebec conferences. Despite his ties to Premier Tupper, he began to dissent from the developing consensus at Quebec. He supported the unpopular arguments of New Brunswick’s Edward Chandler for a loose federation, in which sovereignty would be vested in the individual provinces, and he complained that the financial terms proposed at Quebec would bankrupt Nova Scotia. After he came home, Dickey released a letter declaring he had “had the misfortune to differ from my colleagues in several important details of the scheme.”1 Since he still hoped to see union take place, Dickey was glad to see Tupper’s better-terms resolution ratified in 1866. But his apostasy had been a boon to the anti-confederate cause, and it was not forgotten by the winners. Dickey was dropped from the delegation Nova Scotia sent to London for the final confederation talks later that year.
Dickey did became a senator in 1867, but he nursed ambitions of becoming lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia. The appointment was the prime minister’s to give, but Sir John A. Macdonald was dubious. He brought up Dickey’s disloyalty during the confederation crisis. Was Dickey really a loyal supporter and worthy of this reward?
Dickey assured the leader he was indeed a loyal party man. “I shall support you whenever I think you are right,” he said.
“Anyone will support me when they think I am right,” Macdonald retorted. “What I want is a man that will support me when I am wrong!” Dickey never did become a lieutenant-governor. Macdonald offered the office as bait to recruit one anti-confederate Nova Scotian after another.2
This may not be entirely a true story. Dickey is only one of the putative victims in the versions that exist. But who was the butt of Macdonald’s wit hardly matters; this has always been a story about Macdonald’s ruthless pragmatism in the use of men and of power. It adapts easily into a criticism of the cynical amorality of his era. Poor Dickey, who had been absolutely right about Nova Scotia’s need for better terms, was first denied the opportunity to help negotiate improvements, and later punished for being right too soon.
The misfortunes of Robert Dickey offer more than a lesson in cynicism about nineteenth-century politics. They point directly to the fundamentals of political leadership in the confederation era. And leadership inevitably brings to the fore John A. Macdonald, so far a minor figure in this account of the making of confederation.
Macdonald is the only politician of his era who still conveys a personal image – so much so that it has become hard to see his peers around him. His vivid personality still half-attracts, half-appals, much as it did in his own time. (Weeks into a progressive drunk, Macdonald once horrified an election crowd by vomiting on the stage when he got up to answer his opponent – and then won them back by saying, “I don’t know how it is, but every time I hear Mr. Jones speak it turns my stomach.”) When Macdonald died, Wilfrid Laurier, his successor as the master of Canadian politics, declared that the life of Sir John A. Macdonald “is the history of Canada.” More than a century later, that verdict, at least on the history of confederation, remains widely held.3
Laurier also said that “for the supreme art of governing men, Sir John Macdonald was gifted as few men in any land or any age were gifted.” To get at the leadership secrets of John A. Macdonald and their place in the constitution-making of the 1860s, there is a useful
guide in a late-nineteenth-century connoisseur of political leadership, the English journalist Walter Bagehot.
In the years when confederation was being made, Walter Bagehot was a supremely fortunate young man in his late thirties. He came from a family that was very much part of the educated, well-to-do “ten thousand” who were Britain’s acknowledged rulers. He had been to university. He had been called to the bar but never had to practise. For several years he held the kind of position in his father’s bank that was influential and well-paid but left him abundant time to write literary essays. He had run for Parliament and been not much disappointed to lose. Wonderfully connected and well-informed, he was an amused and sceptical observer of politics and finance. He was blissfully married to an MP’S daughter, and in 1861 his father-in-law had secured him his dream job: editing the family’s magazine, the Economist.
The Economist had been founded to preach free trade and individual responsibility. Bagehot shared that faith, but he gave it an infusion of wit and style and tough-minded political analysis. The weekly editorial “leaders” he wrote for the Economist for the rest of his life made the magazine what it has been ever since: literate and ruthless at once, the pragmatic adviser to people who had money and power and intended to keep them and use them effectively.
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