MACDONALD, Sir JOHN ALEXANDER, lawyer,
businessman, and politician; b. 10 Jan. 1815 (the registered date) or
11 Jan. (the date he and his family celebrated) in Glasgow, Scotland,
son of Hugh Macdonald and Helen Shaw; m. first 1 Sept. 1843 Isabella
Clark (d. 1857) in Kingston, Upper Canada, and they had two sons; m.
secondly 16 Feb. 1867 Susan Agnes Bernard* in London, England, and they had a daughter; d. 6 June 1891 in Ottawa.
John Alexander Macdonald was brought to Kingston at the age of five by his parents, in-laws of Donald Macpherson*,
a retired army officer living near Kingston. His father, who had been
an unsuccessful merchant in Glasgow, operated a series of businesses in
Upper Canada: merchant shops in Kingston and in Adolphustown Township,
and for ten years the large stone mills at Glenora in Prince Edward
County. Though never a man of wealth, Hugh Macdonald achieved sufficient
local prominence to be appointed a magistrate for the Midland District
in 1829. He and his wife saw to it that John received as good an
education as was available to him at the time. He attended the Midland
District Grammar School in 1827–28 and also a private co-educational
school in Kingston where he was given a “classical and general”
education which included the study of Latin and Greek, arithmetic,
geography, English reading and grammar, and rhetoric. His schooling
provided appropriate training for his choice of profession, the law. In
1830, at age 15, he began to article in the office of a Kingston lawyer,
George Mackenzie. He quickly distinguished himself. Two years later he
was entrusted with the management of a branch of Mackenzie’s office, in
Napanee, and in 1833–35 he replaced his cousin Lowther Pennington
Macpherson in the operation of the latter’s legal firm in Hallowell
(Picton). In August 1835 he opened his own firm in Kingston, six months
before being formally called to the bar on 6 Feb. 1836. From 1843 he
usually practised with one or more partners, first with Alexander Campbell and then, from the 1850s, with Archibald John Macdonell and Robert Mortimer Wilkinson.
As a lawyer Macdonald
quickly attracted public attention, mainly by taking on a number of
difficult and even sensational cases, including the defence of William Brass*, a member of a prominent local family who was convicted of rape in 1837, and a series of cases in 1838 involving Nils von Schoultz*
and others charged with involvement in the rebellion of 1837–38 and in
subsequent border raids. (In December 1837 Macdonald himself had served
as a militia private.) Though he lost as many of these cases as he won,
he acquired a reputation for ingenuity and quick-wittedness as a defence
attorney. In fact he did not long find it necessary to depend on a
practice dedicated to the defence of hopeless cases. In 1839 he was
appointed solicitor to the Commercial Bank of the Midland District and
was made a director. From that point on his practice essentially
concerned corporate law, especially after he gained as a client
Kingston’s other major financial institution, the Trust and Loan Company
of Upper Canada, founded in 1843. Though he acted at times for a wide
range of businessmen and businesses, among them the company of Casimir
Stanislaus Gzowski, the Trust and Loan Company for many years provided
Macdonald with the bulk of his professional income.
Macdonald was himself an
active businessman, primarily involved in land development and
speculation. Throughout the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s he bought and
developed urban property, first in Kingston and subsequently in Guelph
and Toronto, and he bought and sold, often through agents, farm and wild
land in many parts of the province, in parcels as large as 9,700 acres
at a time. He also acted as an agent for British investors in Canadian
real estate. Connections formed with British businessmen who were
directors of the Trust and Loan Company led to his being appointed, in
1864, president of a British-backed firm in Quebec, the St Lawrence
Warehouse, Dock and Wharfage Company. He acquired directorships in at
least ten Canadian companies, in addition to the Commercial Bank and the
Trust and Loan Company, and he sat on two British boards. As well, he
invested in bank stock, road companies, and Great Lakes shipping.
Macdonald’s business career was not, however, uniformly successful. He
was caught at the time of the depression of 1857 with much unsaleable
land on which he had to continue to make payments. In the 1860s he would
suffer serious reverses because of the recklessness and sudden death of
his legal partner, A. J. Macdonell, and the collapse of the Commercial
Bank, which had advanced Macdonald loans. None the less, he managed to
avoid failure, continuing to draw income from his law partnership and
from the sale and rental of real estate.
Macdonald had a good
many personal as well as business problems to deal with. In 1843 he
married his cousin Isabella Clark, who, within two years of their
marriage, became chronically ill, suffering from mysterious bouts of
weakness and pain. A modern medical examination of her symptoms
concludes that “she suffered from a somatization disorder, perhaps with a
migrainous component, secondary opiate-dependence and pulmonary
tuberculosis.” Isabella bore two children; in both cases the pregnancies
and deliveries were extremely difficult. The first child, John
Alexander, died at the age of 13 months. The second, Hugh John*, would survive. Isabella herself died in 1857.
From an early age
Macdonald had shown a keen interest in public affairs. He was ambitious
and looked for opportunities wherever he could find them. At age 19, in
1834, he became secretary of both the Prince Edward District Board of
Education and the Hallowell Young Men’s Society. In Kingston he was
recording secretary of the Celtic Society in 1836, president of the
Young Men’s Society of Kingston in 1837, vice-president of the
St Andrew’s Society in 1839, and a prominent member of the Presbyterian
community. In March 1843, now well known as a lawyer, businessman, and
public-spirited citizen, he was easily elected to the Kingston Town
Council as an alderman.
Macdonald’s three-year
service at the local level was quickly overshadowed by his entry into
provincial politics in the general election of October 1844. He ran in
Kingston as a conservative, stressing his belief in the British
connection, his commitment to the development of Canadian resources, and
his devotion to the interests of Kingston and its hinterland. Again he
was elected by a wide margin; provincially, conservative winners
outnumbered reformers by more than two to one.
It has been said that
Macdonald’s political views were influenced by his legal mentor, George
Mackenzie. While Macdonald was in his office, Mackenzie had advocated a
moderate conservatism which stressed commercial expansion but also
adhered to such traditional tory notions as state support for religious
institutions and leadership by an élite. At any rate, in his early years
in the Legislative Assembly Macdonald proved to be a genuine
conservative, opposing responsible government, the secularization of the
clergy reserves, the abolition of primogeniture, and extensions to the
franchise, because such measures were un-British and could weaken the
British connection or the, authority of the governor and also the
necessary propertied element within government and society. Yet he was
never an entirely reactionary conservative. His approach to politics
from the first was always essentially pragmatic. The fact was that
circumstances made it impossible for Macdonald, or any other
conservative politician, to cling to political positions that had become
outmoded. The transfer of power from the governor and his appointed
advisers to elected colonial politicians and the gradual acceptance of
party politics created a system in which exclusivist views could not be
maintained, at least in public. Macdonald preferred conservative options
but did not wish, he stated in 1844, “to waste the time of the
Legislature, and the money of the people, in fruitless discussions of
abstract and theoretical questions of government.”
For six of the first ten
years of his political career-between 1848 and 1854 – his party was not
in power and his practicality was expressed mainly in efforts to
promote the interests of his constituency. He regularly presented
petitions and introduced legislation dealing with such matters as the
incorporation of Kingston as a city; its debt; support for its
charitable, religious, and educational bodies; and particularly the
promotion of such Kingston-area businesses as road and railway
companies, insurance companies, financial institutions, and gas, light,
and water companies. (Macdonald had a personal financial interest in all
of these businesses.) He was a conscientious and successful
constituency man and would be re-elected from Kingston in seven
consecutive elections for the assembly between 1844 and 1867 and in
three for the federal house between 1867 and 1874.
Macdonald’s first
experience as a cabinet member was in 1847–48, when he served for seven
months as receiver general and for three as commissioner of crown lands
in the administrations headed by William Henry Draper* and Henry Sherwood*.
In these posts Macdonald proved himself an able and even a reformist
administrator, but his chief political initiative was devising and
advocating the University Endowment Bill for Upper Canada in 1847. It
did not pass but it reflected both his conservatism and his pragmatism.
In an attempt to steer a middle course between the reform policy of a
single state-supported, nonsectarian university and tory plans for a
revived and strengthened Anglican King’s College in Toronto, he proposed
to divide the university endowment among the existing denominational
colleges but to give King’s College the largest share. In 1848 he
resigned with the government to make way for the reform administration
of Robert Baldwin* and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine*.
Macdonald did not hold
office again until September 1854, when he became attorney general for
Upper Canada in the newly formed coalition government of Sir Allan
Napier MacNab* and Augustin-Norbert Morin*.
His role in the formation of that coalition, from which some historians
have dated the emergence of the modern Conservative party, is not
entirely clear. The traditional version of the formation, which appears
to have begun with John Charles Dent*’s account in The last forty years
(1881), was that “his was the hand that shaped the course” of the
negotiations. Donald Robert Beer’s well-founded modern view is that
there is “no direct evidence” of Macdonald’s “special contribution to
these events.” The exact extent of his involvement will probably never
be known, but it is certain that the expanded party created in 1854
exactly fitted his own plan, mentioned in a letter to James McGill Strachan*
in February of that year, to “enlarge the bounds of our party” and was
in line with his already established “friendly relations with the
French.” In 1861 Macdonald himself dated the existence of a solidly
based Liberal-Conservative coalition from that occasion, “when I took
them [the Conservative party] up in 1854.”
As attorney general (a
position he would hold until 1867 except for periods in 1858 and
1862–64) Macdonald assumed a heavy administrative load because the
office not only oversaw the judicial and penal systems of Upper Canada
but handled a constant stream of references from the other government
departments on points of law. He again proved a competent, if somewhat
spasmodic, administrator and was shrewd in his choice of expert and
efficient deputies: Robert Alexander Harrison* (1854–59) and Hewitt Bernard (1858–67).
In the assembly he assumed an increasing share of the legislative load.
His first major task was to steer through the act for the abolition of
the clergy reserves, a measure that demonstrated his conservatism and
his pragmatism by preserving a share of the revenues for clerical
(mostly Anglican) incumbents but at the same time disposing of
along-standing, contentious issue. As he said in November 1854, “You
must yield to the times.” In the same session, in early 1855, he assumed
responsibility in the lower house for a controversial bill on Upper
Canada’s separate schools, for which the Roman Catholic Church, led by
Bishop Armand-François-Marie de Charbonnel, had lobbied the government. The bill was introduced first in the Legislative Council by Étienne-Paschal Taché*
and in the assembly only in May, near the end of the session, when many
Upper Canadian members had already left Quebec (the capital). Though
provision for separate schools in Upper Canada had existed since 1841 [see Egerton Ryerson*],
the act of 1855 really created the basis of the system that was to
persist in Upper Canada and then in Ontario. It was defended by
Macdonald on religious grounds – the right of Roman Catholics, according
to the Globe’s report in June, “to educate their children
according to their own principles.” The bill itself and the manner of
its introduction had been severely criticized by Joseph Hartman*
and others and ultimately opposed by a majority of Upper Canadian
members, but it had passed on the strength of French Canadian Catholic
votes. Macdonald was accused, probably rightly, of parliamentary
manipulation and he laid the government open to a charge of “French
domination” of the administration. The issue also provided arguments for
those in Upper Canada, led by George Brown* of the Globe,
who since 1853 had advocated the introduction of a system of
representation by population in the provincial parliament, which would
have given Upper Canada a greater number of seats than Lower Canada.
In 1856 Macdonald
became, for the first time, leader of the Upper Canadian section of the
government, replacing MacNab. The manner in which he assumed control has
been the subject of some controversy. MacNab had come under increasing
criticism within the coalition because of his lingering reputation as a
compact tory and his growing ineffectiveness due to ill health. No doubt
he should have resigned but he refused, making it necessary to force
him out of office so that a reconstruction of the cabinet could occur.
Macdonald does not appear to have acted purely out of personal ambition;
he too had become convinced that MacNab had to go. He took part in the
ouster, first by sending MacNab an ultimatum, which he rejected, and
then by joining the Reform members of the cabinet, Joseph Curran Morrison* and Robert Spence*, in resigning from it on 21 May (the other Upper Canadian Conservative, William Cayley*,
soon followed) on the grounds that the government had been in a
minority among the Upper Canadian members on a vote of confidence.
MacNab had no choice but to place his portfolio at the disposal of
Governor General Sir Edmund Walker Head*.
The cabinet was reorganized on the 24th, with Taché as premier and
Macdonald as co-premier. Macdonald now assumed the leadership role he
was to hold for the rest of his life.
His approach to
political power and responsibility was in practice highly personal.
Before confederation he always shared the direction of the government
and his party with a French Canadian leader, especially after
November 1857 when the energetic George-Étienne Cartier*
took over from Taché. Macdonald himself kept a firm hand on the affairs
of the party in his own section of the Province of Canada. He was its
chief strategist, fund-raiser, and, during elections, campaign
organizer. He intervened directly at the riding level to ensure that
suitable candidates were nominated, often having to sort out the rival
claims of as many as six potential Liberal-Conservative mlas and
if necessary “buying off” (usually with the promise of a government
appointment) those who might create a party “split.” He advised
candidates on policy and tactics and arranged election funding where
necessary. He attempted to acquire the bloc support of a number of large
groups, such as the Orange order and the adherents of the Methodist and
Catholic churches, by appealing to the leaders of these organizations,
including Ogle Robert Gowan*, Ryerson, and bishops Rémi Gaulin* and Edward John Horan*,
for their influence with their followers. Despite his best efforts,
however, Macdonald was not notably successful in winning elections in
Upper Canada before confederation. In 1861, after his first extensive
speaking tour and a campaign in which he advocated a British North
American federation and raised the old “no looking to Washington” cry of
loyalty, his candidates achieved only a small majority of Upper
Canadian seats. In the other elections under his management, in 1857–58
and 1863, the Upper Canadian Conservatives were defeated.
Macdonald was
nevertheless an adroit politician and a popular campaigner. He
successfully combined political shrewdness with a talent for
conviviality and for good-humouredly persuading his colleagues to follow
his lead. On the platform he projected a no-nonsense political image,
coupled with a flair for ridiculing the foibles of his opponents.
Clearly, by 1855 colleagues recognized Macdonald’s capacity for drink
and soft sawder as important elements of his strength; others
underestimated his skills because of them. But on occasion he was a hard
drinker. The first time his drinking seems to have been a serious
public problem was in the spring of 1862, at a time of government
instability and during debate on a bill to expand the militia that
Macdonald had introduced and defended. The Globe reported him
as having “one of his old attacks.” Because Macdonald took so much
personal responsibility for leadership, when he went on a binge his
party drifted. On 21 May 1862, after the defeat of the bill, the
government resigned.
The truth was that the
Upper Canadian Conservatives had usually been sustained in power by
their alliance with Cartier and the Bleu bloc, which held a majority in
Lower Canada. This relationship had obvious political advantages and
reflected both Macdonald’s belief in French-English cooperation and his
long-standing commitment to the union of Upper and Lower Canada as an
economic necessity. The relationship also meant that his brand of
Conservatism had become more and more unpopular in his own section of
the province and increasingly open to charges of “French domination” of
the ministry. Whether from conviction or necessity Macdonald had been
forced to defend, against a hostile Protestant majority in the
population of Upper Canada, the system of Catholic separate schools. He
personally opposed representation by population as a basis for the
distribution of seats in the assembly, even though most Upper Canadians
and eventually many of his Upper Canadian Conservative followers, among
them John Hillyard Cameron*,
came out in support of the principle. After 1851 the population of the
western section of the province exceeded the east’s so that adopting the
principle would have reduced the effectiveness of the French Canadians
as a political group. Macdonald also, like Cartier, showed limited
enthusiasm for another popular Upper Canadian movement, the annexation
of the vast territory west of Canada. Though the Taché–Macdonald
government in 1857 made a vague claim to the lands then under the
jurisdiction of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Macdonald was not much
concerned. In 1865 he was to state in a letter to Edward William Watkin,
the former Grand Trunk president who had examined the question of
confederation for the Colonial Office, that he was “quite willing
personally to leave that whole country a wilderness for the next fifty
years.” Thus in the period 1854–64 he was in a kind of political trap of
his own making. To stay in power he needed French Canadian support but
that necessity in turn involved support for policies that were a
political liability in his own section of the province.
Macdonald tried to
compensate for the political weakness of Conservatism in Upper Canada in
a number of ways. He insisted that the party officially remain a
coalition of moderate Reformers and Conservatives and he always kept a
succession of Hincksite Reform members, such as Morrison, Spence, and
John Ross*, or Reform defectors such as Michael Hamilton Foley* or Thomas D’Arcy McGee*
in the cabinet to try to broaden his party’s image and appeal. He also
tried to compensate for political shortcomings by developing a
centralized system of government patronage. Macdonald was, of course,
far from the first politician to dispense patronage but, unlike his
Conservative predecessors, he maintained a strong personal hold over
office-giving while in power and he used offices, or the promise of
office, in a deliberate attempt to strengthen the party at the local
level, on the principle that reward should only result from actual
service. By making sure that recommendations on patronage were “attached
to the legal department,” as Macdonald stressed in January 1855, and by
working hard on behalf of people to whom he had made commitments, he
was able to raise the level of loyalty to the party, and to himself,
throughout the province.
Though never associated
with legislation that produced dramatic or sweeping reforms, during the
period when he was most influential as attorney general, party leader,
or co-premier (1854–62), he oversaw, particularly in the late 1850s, the
introduction of measures and administrative changes which contributed a
good deal to the efficient running of a rapidly expanding and changing
province. In the 1850s in Canada the state had just begun to assume
responsibility for social welfare; the only existing provincial
institutions in Upper Canada were the penitentiary at Kingston and the
lunatic asylum in Toronto [see Joseph Workman]. Between 1856
and 1861 branches of the asylum were opened in Toronto, Amherstburg, and
Orillia. An institution for the criminally insane was established in
Kingston in 1858. The first reformatory for juvenile offenders began in
temporary quarters in Penetanguishene the following year. By the act of
1857 that provided for the asylum for the criminally insane and the
reformatory, a permanent board of inspectors was created to oversee and
set standards for all state welfare and correctional institutions,
including 52 local jails. Under Macdonald’s leadership the basis of a
public social-welfare system was laid down and gradually extended. In
1866 the Municipal Institutions Act (rescinded after confederation)
required the establishment of a house of industry or a refuge for the
poor in each well-populated county within two years.
During the same years a
great deal of expansion and reorganization of the government’s
bureaucracy was undertaken. The question of a permanent seat of
government, which had exacerbated urban rivalries for years, was settled
by the ingenious device, on the part of Macdonald and others, of
referring the issue to the queen in 1857 [see Sir Edmund Walker
Head]. Announcement of her choice of Ottawa occasioned the temporary
defeat of the Macdonald–Cartier government in July 1858, but when the
Reformers under George Brown were unable to attract a parliamentary
majority, it returned to office within 48 hours by means of the
controversial “double shuffle” manœuvre [see William Henry Draper]. In 1859 a parliamentary decision in favour of Ottawa was finally reached by a majority of five votes.
The Civil Service Act of
1857 established the rule that each major government agency would have a
permanent, non-political head called a deputy minister. A first attempt
to bring fiscal responsibility into government had been undertaken in
the Audit Act of 1855 and the appointment of Macdonald’s friend and
former Conservative colleague John Langton as
auditor of public accounts. Further financial change occurred in 1859
when the office of inspector general was elevated to a full-fledged
Department of Finance, completing a long process by which the office of
receiver general, who was originally the province’s most important
financial officer, was downgraded to a minor post. Two new departments
were created. The Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics, established in
1857, became a full department in 1862 [see Joseph-Charles
Taché]. The previous year Macdonald had imposed a political head, the
minister of militia affairs, upon the bureaucratic post of adjutant
general of militia. In December 1861 Macdonald himself assumed the
responsibility of being the first minister, a post which he held until
May 1862, during the sensitive opening year of the American Civil War,
and again in 1865–67, at the time of the Fenian raids. The expansion
included the creation in 1857, within the Crown Lands Department, of a
fisheries branch, charged with preserving and protecting fresh-water
fish-stocks, and, more significant, the assumption by the province in
1860 of complete responsibility for Indian affairs, previously under
imperial control [see Richard Theodore Pennefather*].
Attempts were also made
to develop areas of a province that was rapidly running out of
accessible agricultural land. In 1858 two temporary judicial districts
(Algoma and Nipissing) were established, tightening the government’s
control in these thinly populated northern areas. A network of
colonization roads was planned under the direction of Crown Lands to
encourage settlement in the southern section of the Canadian Shield
beyond the existing areas of cultivation. These roads when built were
never successful in their agricultural purpose (though they were helpful
to the lumber industry), but the construction of several during
Macdonald’s period in office reflected his often-expressed view that
there was a “fertile back country” which only needed an improved
transportation system to permit it to develop.
In the late 1850s, and
especially in 1857, when more bills were passed than in any other year
in the entire union period, the Macdonald–Cartier government undertook
many legislative initiatives including the Independence of Parliament
Act (1857), amendments to the Municipal Corporations Act (1857 and
1858), an act for the registration of voters (1858), and amendments
(1858) affecting the operation of the surrogate courts, the usury law,
the composition of juries, and imprisonment for debt (it was abolished
in most cases). As attorney general Macdonald was responsible for a
number of significant reforms of the judicial system itself, among them
the Common Law Procedure Act (1856), the County Attorneys Act (1857),
and an act which permitted appeal in criminal cases (1857). In addition,
this business-oriented government adopted a wide range of measures to
stimulate economic growth. These included not only continued support of
the Grand Trunk Railway but also, in the budget brought in by Inspector
General William Cayley in 1857 and seen through the legislature by
Alexander Tilloch Galt the
following year, the first tariff system of “incidental protection” for
Canadian industry. This system, foreshadowing the National Policy of the
1870s, was responsible for “numerous manufactories of every description
which have sprung up in both sections of the province,” according to
Macdonald in 1861. In 1859 Postmaster General Sidney Smith*,
one of Macdonald’s closest political friends, concluded arrangements
with the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Prussia for
mail service to Canada and the United States. Macdonald and his
colleagues also encouraged and supported a large number of acts
incorporating new businesses and expanding the scope of existing ones,
including road and rail companies, insurance companies, banks, mining,
oil and lumber companies, and many others, in some of which Macdonald
and his parliamentary associates had a personal interest.
Macdonald went into
opposition in 1862 when the Militia Bill was defeated in the assembly.
He returned to office two years later, in very different political
circumstances. The election of 1863 had returned almost twice as many
Reformers as Conservatives in Upper Canada, but the situation overall,
owing to the continued strength of Cartier’s Bleus and the
English-speaking Conservatives of Lower Canada, was a virtual stalemate.
An administration led by the Reformers John Sandfield Macdonald* and Louis-Victor Sicotte*
and then another formed in March 1864 by E.-P. Taché and Macdonald each
failed to sustain majority support. A constitutional committee of the
legislature chaired by George Brown, of which Macdonald was a member,
reported on 14 June in favour of a federal system of government for the
two sections of Canada or for all of the British North American
provinces. This proposal received wide support in the Province of Canada
because it offered a way out of the highly polarized political deadlock
and would provide Upper and Lower Canada with separate provincial
governments, thus allowing for greater regional freedom of action and a
lessening of sectional and racial tensions. Macdonald, however, with two
others from Brown’s 20-member committee, refused to endorse its report,
which was supported by almost all of the leading Canadian politicians
of the day. Though he had been part of an administration which, as early
as 1858, favoured a federal union, he had always been cool to the idea
because, he stated in a public address in 1861, he feared a federation
would have “the defects in the Constitution of the United States” – a
weak central government. Macdonald had always preferred a highly
centralized, preferably unitary, form of government that would not be
torn by jurisdictional disputes, which, he believed, had been “so
painfully made manifest” during the Civil War.
Despite these strong
misgivings about federation, when Brown suggested combined action to
bring about constitutional change, Macdonald reversed his stand. His
shift came within two days, on 16 June 1864. The result was the
formation on the 30th of the “Great Coalition,” by which the majority of
the Upper Canadian Reformers joined with Macdonald’s Conservatives and
Cartier’s Bleus for the purpose of creating a federal union of British
North America. The reasons for Macdonald’s abrupt change of mind were
both visionary and entirely practical. Federation would “prevent
anarchy,” “settle the great Constitutional question of Parliamentary
Reform in Canada,” and “restore the credit of the Province abroad.” In
other words, the united provinces would form a larger, stronger, more
harmonious community and even a potential rival to the United States.
More immediately the coalition allowed him to escape from serious
political difficulties in his own section of Canada, where the Reform
party appeared to be gaining unbeatable strength. “I then had the
option,” he wrote privately in 1866, “either of forming a Coalition
Government or of handing over the administration of affairs to the Grit
party for the next ten years.”
From 1864 to 1867
Macdonald was preoccupied with two overriding concerns: the Civil War –
its aftermath and its implications for Canada – and the not unrelated
matter of the confederation of British North America. In October 1864 a
raid on St Albans, Vt, by Confederate soldiers operating from Canada and
their later release on a technicality by Montreal magistrate
Charles-Joseph Coursol*
caused a strong anti-Canadian reaction in the United States. In
December its government demanded that all persons entering the United
States from British North America be required to hold a passport and
Congress began proceedings for the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty,
in force since 1854. The Canadian government responded by calling out
2,000 militia volunteers to attempt to prevent further incidents along
the border. As attorney general Macdonald authorized the creation of a
small “detective and preventive force” to gather information, using
Canadian agents and American informants in several American cities. In
charge of this first Canadian secret-service unit (which became the
Dominion Police after confederation) Macdonald, in December, placed a
“shrewd, cool, and determined man,” a Scottish immigrant and former mla named Gilbert McMicken. He
reported directly and secretly to Macdonald, who in August 1865 once
again added the responsibilities of minister of militia affairs to those
of attorney general.
In 1864 Macdonald and
McMicken were also forced to become concerned about the Fenian
Brotherhood, an Irish-American paramilitary organization dedicated to
the liberation of Ireland. There were fears of Fenianism spreading into
Canada and there were rumours and a few incidents of armed organization
on the part of the Hibernian Benevolent Society of Canada [see Michael Murphy*; John O’Neill*],
but the menace turned out to be external. In 1866 raids were launched
on Campobello Island in New Brunswick and, with more success, across the
Niagara River at Fort Erie. Fenianism thereafter faded as a threat to
British North American security but events of 1864–66 undoubtedly
contributed to an “atmosphere of crisis” which had an important effect
on the rapid achievement of a federal union and on the form it took. The
coalition government established in 1864 was under the titular
leadership of Taché but Macdonald quickly became the mainspring of the
confederation negotiations that followed. Brown had wanted the coalition
first to pursue a federal union of the two Canadas alone. Macdonald
insisted, and got his way, that the priority should be a union of all
the provinces. An opportunity to further this aim presented itself,
since the Maritime provinces had already begun preparations for a
regional conference to discuss the possibility of a legislative union of
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island [see Arthur Hamilton Gordon*; Sir Charles Tupper*].
Viscount Monck, governor general of British North America, arranged
with the lieutenant governors of those provinces to allow a Canadian
delegation to attend the conference, planned for Charlottetown, to
present informally a proposal for federation. During the summer of 1864
the Canadian cabinet prepared its proposals. When the delegation arrived
at the conference in September, it was invited to present its case at
once, before any discussion of Maritime union. Macdonald spoke first,
beginning a process that was to culminate with the passage of the
British North America Act three years later. It led to the Quebec
conference in October 1864 between representatives of Canada, Nova
Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland, and
eventually to the final meetings of the delegates of Canada, Nova
Scotia, and New Brunswick with the British government in London between
December 1866 and February 1867.
The extent to which
Macdonald was personally responsible for the form and substance of the
confederation agreement has been the subject of debate, but there is no
doubt that he was the dominant figure throughout the events of 1864–67.
At the Quebec conference he was the principal spokesman for the Canadian
scheme, which had been worked out in some detail. He chaired the
meetings in London in 1866–67 (in February 1867 he married there). The
British North America Bill, for the federal union of Canada, Nova
Scotia, and New Brunswick, was signed into law on 29 March 1867, to be
proclaimed on 1 July. Macdonald’s role was amply recognized in Great
Britain. He was the only colonial leader to be awarded an honorary
degree (from Oxford in 1865) or to be given a knighthood (conferred
29 June 1867, announced 1 July), and he was, of course, selected as the
first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada. (He had been asked by
Monck in May to form the first administration.)
Certainly much of the
constitutional structure of the dominion was his creation. He could not
say so publicly, but in private he claimed almost complete responsibility for the confederation
scheme on the grounds that he alone had possessed the necessary
background in constitutional theory and law. In the “preparation of our
Constitution,” he had told his close friend county court judge James
Robert Gowan*
in November 1864, “I must do it alone as there is not one person
connected with the Government who has the slightest idea of the nature
of the work.” His colleague Thomas D’Arcy McGee said in public in 1866
that Macdonald was the author of 50 of the 72 resolutions agreed upon at
Quebec.
Even at the time some played down Macdonald’s role. George Brown challenged McGee’s statement in the Globe
and attributed the confederation plan to the collective efforts of the
Canadian cabinet. Certainly there were aspects which Macdonald did not
initiate and some of which he did not particularly approve. The
financial arrangements, as he admitted, were the work of A. T. Galt.
Representation by population, the principle that governed membership in
the lower house, had long been advocated by Brown and was made a
fundamental part of confederation at his insistence. The provisions for
the official use of the French language in parliament, in the federal
courts, and in the courts and legislature of Quebec, as well as the
continuance of the code civil in that province, were clearly
Cartier’s contribution. The arrangements for the preservation of
existing separate schools and for their establishment in new provinces
were largely inspired by Galt. Before confederation Macdonald had never
shared Brown’s great enthusiasm for extending Canadian jurisdiction into
the northwest, or for an intercolonial railway, which was provided for
in an unusual constitutional clause insisted upon in London by the
Maritime delegates, who included Jonathan McCully*, William Alexander Henry*, and Samuel Leonard Tilley. To what extent then can the BNA Act be said to have been “the Macdonaldian Constitution”?
The terms of the act
were not precisely what Macdonald would have wanted had he been allowed a
free hand, but he believed that his main objectives had been achieved.
His overriding goal had always been a system that, though federal in
order to secure the assent of Quebec and the Maritimes, would be as
centralized as possible, with a central government directed by a
powerful executive. In the act the division of powers between the
central and provincial governments reflected his aims. The federal
powers were more numerous and contained the blanket phrase “peace, order
and good government.” In that phrase was the most sweeping grant of
power known to the drafters at the Colonial Office, who supported
Macdonald’s centralist position. Macdonald intended to have ample room
for anything he wanted to do. The federal powers were also concerned
with those areas of jurisdiction where Macdonald believed real power
lay: national defence, finance, trade and commerce, taxation, currency,
and banking. As well the federal government was given the power
(exercised by the imperial government before 1848) to disallow
provincial legislation. (In June 1868 a justice department memorandum
approved by cabinet for transmission to the provinces was to emphasize a
new and exacting use of disallowance, so that even the strongest of
provincial rights was to be subject to central surveillance.) The
federal cabinet appointed its own provincial watch-dogs, the lieutenant
governors, as well as the members of the Senate, the body designed by
Macdonald to represent the well-to-do, propertied element of Canadian
society, though the House of Commons would continue to be elected on a
property franchise. Macdonald believed he had avoided the chief
weaknesses of the American federation: universal suffrage and a weak
executive. Canada would be run from the centre by people who had a
genuine stake in the community. Macdonald’s omission from the BNA Act of
a formula for amending the structures and powers of the central
government was probably not, as is often suggested, an oversight. Having
seen to it that the local legislatures could amend their own
constitutional arrangements within the tight constraints of section 92,
Macdonald would not have neglected something analogous in section 91, on
the powers of parliament, had he thought he needed it.
Macdonald’s private
agenda for the future of the new federation went much farther than the
BNA Act revealed. It was not just that a provincial government was to be
“a subordinate legislature.” The provincial governments, he maintained,
had been made fatally weak and were ultimately to cease to exist. He
envisaged a Canada with one government and, as nearly as possible, one
homogenous population sharing common institutions and characteristics.
In December 1864 he told Matthew Crooks Cameron*
that “if the Confederation goes on[,] you, if spared the ordinary age
of man, will see both Local Parliaments & Governments absorbed in
the General Power. This is as plain to me as if I saw it accomplished
but of course it does not do to adopt that point of view in discussing
the subject in Lower Canada.” He was undoubtedly wise not to make such
sentiments public, for among French Canadians, by whom the provincial
governments were already being seen as the centre of what would become
known as “provincial rights,” there were even in 1864 suspicions of his
intentions. Ottawa’s Le Canada, edited by Elzéar Gérin*,
argued in 1866, “The more the local legislature is simplified, the more
its importance will be diminished and the greater the risk of its being
absorbed by the federal legislature.” Macdonald thought he had set in
motion an evolutionary constitutional process which in time would
further alter the relative importance of the two levels of government.
His colleague, Hewitt Bernard, secretary of all the confederation
conferences, had acquired an inner core of experience about how
Macdonald’s constitutional ideas could be translated into practice.
Asked by Governor General Lord Dufferin [Blackwood*]
in 1874 to comment on the BNA Act in the light of seven years of
operation, Bernard directed his criticisms mainly at making still more
explicit and restrictive the provincial powers covered in section 92.
In many practical ways
the administrative structure of the new dominion government was that of
the Province of Canada shifted into a new gear. The capital remained at
Ottawa, of course, and many of the old province’s deputy ministers and
chief officers occupied senior positions in the federal civil service,
among them Bernard, Joseph-Charles Taché, William Henry Griffin,
Toussaint Trudeau, Edmund Allen Meredith, and John Langton. Macdonald
was more ambitious than his colleagues to make not only constitutional
room for central power but physical space as well. He wanted more land
in central Ottawa than his colleagues would let him take. Macdonald
wished, for instance, to take over Nepean Point for the governor
general’s residence, but his colleagues would have none of it. He told
Joseph Pope*
years later that Rideau Hall had cost them more to patch up than a new
residence would have cost at Nepean Point. Macdonald wanted to take the
whole block between Wellington and Sparks streets east of Metcalfe for
future departmental offices. His colleagues balked at that too.
The Department of
Justice was the portfolio Macdonald himself chose in 1867 and the one he
retained until the resignation of his government in November 1873. He
supervised the splitting of functions in 1867, consigning those of his
former office, the attorney generalship of Upper Canada, to the
provincial government in Toronto. The senior staff in his old office
remained with the new department; no break in Macdonald’s old
departmental letter-books occurred.
His duties also tended
to be a continuation of those he had carried as attorney general. The
pardoning power, which belonged to the governor general, compelled
Macdonald to review capital cases, and the penitentiary system was a
federal responsibility. Federal involvement in both had been insisted
upon by the Colonial Office; it is by no means certain that Macdonald
wanted them. The penitentiary system he left to Hewitt Bernard, but in
his policies he continued his tendency to be firm rather than
charitable. The primary object of penitentiaries, he told John Creighton*,
the warden in Kingston, in 1871, was “punishment, the incidental one,
reformation.” It was possible to make prisons too comfortable, prisoners
too happy. (Read David Copperfield, he said, particularly
where Uriah Heep, in a model prison, is so much better off than poor
people living outside it.) The power of release ought to be used
sparingly. Certainty of punishment was of more consequence than severity
of sentence. Macdonald attributed the high rate of crime in the United
States to the ease with which pardons could be obtained through
political pressure on state governors.
When Thomas D’Arcy McGee
was shot on 7 April 1868, the full power of the dominion government was
placed at the disposal of the attorney general of Ontario, in whose
hands lay the responsibility for prosecution. The dominion shared the
expenses of prosecuting Patrick James Whelan*,
and Bernard, as deputy minister of justice, took a prominent part in
finding evidence in Ottawa. Although John Sandfield Macdonald was
premier of Ontario as well as attorney general, Sir John virtually took
over the case. He was implacable. Pressures arose for a stay of
execution; even the prosecuting counsel, James O’Reilly*,
seemed uncomfortable; John Hillyard Cameron, the defence counsel,
thought there should have been a new trial or at the least an appeal to
the Privy Council. Yet Macdonald was ordinarily of milder mien,
especially in cases where the evidence was ambiguous. The death sentence
of Baptiste Renard, convicted in 1864 of rape, had been commuted, as
usual, to life imprisonment. Three years later, after Bishop Edward John
Horan of Kingston brought new evidence to Macdonald’s attention, Renard
was discharged.
The early sessions of
the Canadian parliament showed Macdonald’s strong centralist views about
the assimilation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Hudson’s Bay
Company territory. The new North-West Territories, to be carved out of
Rupert’s Land, were to become, Macdonald admitted, Canadian crown
colonies, administered as such. He had things to learn; but the first
year or so of confederation showed how firmly a central Canadian he was,
sanguine about issues and difficulties that he was unfamiliar with. In
the face of continuing anti-confederate sentiment in Nova Scotia,
customs minister S. L. Tilley had to warn him in July 1868 from Windsor,
N.S., “There is no use in crying peace when there is no peace.
We require wise and prudent action at this moment.” Macdonald was a
realist, but realism with him took the form of perceptions forced upon a
sanguine temperament. This odd combination gave him the incentive,
dodger that he was, to adapt, shift, make expedients. He would not bow
down to difficulties: he would try to work his way out of them. In the
case of Nova Scotia, the recklessness of its premier, Charles Tupper, in
pressing the province to enter confederation and his own central
Canadian perspective had got him into trouble; when he moved it was
late, but he acted with skill, courage, and resourcefulness. He
travelled to Halifax in August 1868 in order to meet Joseph Howe* to work out measures to ease the conflict between Nova Scotia and the dominion.
The application of an “imperial screw” to Nova Scotia [see Sir William Fenwick Williams*]
was not something he would willingly repeat. By 1869 he knew that as a
mode for political unions it was counter-productive. At the end of that
year Governor Stephen John Hill of Newfoundland suggested the colony
might be added to Canada by imperial fiat. Macdonald would have none of
it. Although terms of union had been negotiated with Canada by a
delegation led by the island’s premier, Frederic Bowker Terrington Carter,
in the fall general election Newfoundlanders had definitely pronounced
themselves against confederation. That, as far as Macdonald was
concerned, was that. He would not impose Canadian rule on another colony
without local opinion being tested and found willing. This attitude
explains his readiness to negotiate at the first sign of trouble at Red
River (Man.) in 1869 [see Louis Riel*].
He would insist, for the same reason, on an election in British
Columbia before confederation was cemented in place there in 1871. He
would be endlessly patient with the demands, and elections, of Prince
Edward Islanders. “I see that you have quite a political ferment about
your Railway,” he wrote in October 1871 to his doctor in Charlottetown,
William Hamilton Hobkirk. “I hope that the result of the increase of
your pecuniary burdens will be your making a junction with the Dominion;
but such a consummation . . . can be hastened by no action on our part,
it must arise altogether from your own people.”
The acquisition of
Rupert’s Land was a major item on his 1869 agenda. This had been
negotiated in London on Canada’s behalf largely by Cartier. He and
William McDougall*,
the minister of public works, arrived in London in October 1868; the
latter was taken seriously ill almost at once. Cartier’s negotiations
crossed two ministries, Disraeli’s on the way out and Gladstone’s on the
way in. Although McDougall was convinced that Gladstone’s government
would be more favourable to the Canadian cause, Cartier believed the
opposite and he was right. Cartier left for Canada only on 1 April 1869,
after six months of continuous negotiations. Under the dominion’s
temporary government act, assented to in June, a lieutenant governor and
council were to administer the territories, which were to be
transferred formally to Canada on 1 December.
After McDougall accepted
the office of lieutenant governor of the North-West Territories (what
Macdonald privately called his “dreary sovereignty”) Macdonald followed
up a long conference with him by letters full of good sense. “The point
which you must never forget,” he advised sternly on 20 November, “is
that you are now, approaching a Foreign country, under the Government of
the Hudson Bay Company. . . . You cannot force your way in.” Macdonald
encouraged him to retain Riel (a “clever fellow”) for his “future
police,” and thus to give “a most convincing proof that you are not
going to leave the half breeds out of the Law.”
For the troubles that
had already arisen in the Red River settlement over a federal survey and
the transfer of the northwest, Macdonald, so far as he knew of them,
put some blame on local priests. He also put some, privately, on Cartier
for having “rather snubbed” Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché of St Boniface that summer when he came through Ottawa on his way to Rome. Secretary of State Hector-Louis Langevin*
was thought to have patched things up, but Macdonald believed by late
November that Taché’s irritation had got back to Red River. The main
burden of blame Macdonald put upon officials of the HBC. The
dissatisfaction of the Métis was well known to its local council. The
transfer had been planned and known of for months. HBC officer John
H. McTavish had been in Ottawa in April, had seen Macdonald and others,
and had been told of the transfer of the northwest to Canada with the
same rights for its inhabitants as had existed before. Yet company
officials gave no explanation to the people of Red River about what was
to happen. “All that those poor people know,” Macdonald said to Cartier
on 27 November, “is that Canada has bought the country . . . & that
they are handed over like a flock of sheep to us; and they are told that
they lose their lands . . . . Under these circumstances it is not to be
wondered at that they should be dissatisfied, and should show their
discontent.”
Macdonald’s advice to
McDougall that same day, in the light of what was then known, was good
law and common sense. He told McDougall in a letter not to cross the
49th parallel and not to be sworn in as lieutenant governor. The policy
should be to throw full responsibility for the unrest on the HBC and the
imperial government. A proclamation from McDougall calling for the
loyalty of the people in Red River would be well if it were certain to
be obeyed. But if it were disobeyed, Macdonald reasoned, McDougall’s
weakness would be “painfully exhibited” to the people and to the
Americans. If he were not admitted to the country, a proclamation would
create anarchy; it would then be open to the inhabitants of Red River
“to form a government ex necessitate for the protection of life and property, and such a government has certain sovereign rights by jus gentium.”
The Americans might even be tempted to recognize it. This advice
reached McDougall too late to save him from his own folly of 1 December,
when he precipitately proclaimed the northwest to be part of Canada. A
week later Riel established a provisional government. At about the same
time, Macdonald sent emissaries, Charles-René-Léonidas d’Irumberry* de Salaberry and Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thibault*, when he thought reassurances were needed, and Donald Alexander Smith*
as a commissioner to negotiate the moment he saw that real mediation
was going to be necessary. What he did not want was the British
government sending out an imperial commissioner. He believed, as did the
whole Canadian cabinet, “that to send out an overwashed Englishman,
utterly ignorant of the Country and full of crotchets as all Englishmen
are, would be a mistake.”
When Taché came back
through Ottawa in February 1870, Cartier ate as much humble pie as
seemed requisite. But so sensitive was the northwest issue as a result
of Thomas Scott*’s execution in March that two of the delegates sent east by Riel in March, Alfred Henry Scott* and Abbé Joseph-Noël Ritchot*,
were arrested for complicity in the murder. Macdonald hired John
Hillyard Cameron to help get them off and made the $500 payment
privately so that it would not appear in public accounts.
On 6 May, as the bill to
create the new province of Manitoba was going through the House of
Commons, Macdonald was struck down by the passage of a gallstone. He was
so weak he could not be moved home, and his corner office in the east
block became his sick-room. In early July Macdonald, his wife, his
little daughter, his mother-in-law, Hewitt Bernard, Dr James Alexander Grant*,
a nurse, and a secretary went off to Charlottetown by government
steamer from Quebec. The party arrived on 8 July and took up residence
in a large rambling house in the suburbs. Macdonald was still so weak in
the legs that he could not walk. It has been alleged that there,
besides following the Franco-German War, Macdonald hatched the scheme to
buy Prince Edward Island into confederation by getting its government
to build a railway. Suspicions do not make evidence. What is certain is
that Macdonald was not going to take the Island into confederation
without a convincing display of local support. He was back in Ottawa on
22 September, impressing everyone with how well he looked.
He soon took hold of
bringing British Columbia into confederation. Negotiations had been
conducted by Cartier in June 1870. On 29 September Macdonald told the
colony’s governor, Anthony Musgrave*,
that though the terms Cartier had negotiated, including the
construction of a transcontinental railway, could be justified on their
merits, “considerable opposition” could be expected in parliament
because they would likely be seen as too burdensome to Canada and too
liberal to British Columbia. He therefore told Musgrave to try to follow
the course taken when the Newfoundland resolutions were going through
parliament in 1869: have members of the colonial government come to
Ottawa to discuss awkward points with the mps, especially the Conservative caucus. In April–May 1871 Joseph William Trutch* came east for that purpose and helped Cartier secure parliament’s approval of the British Columbia terms of union.
Macdonald was again
absent from the House of Commons. He had had to assume the thankless
role of being a Canadian and an Englishman at the same time: as one of
the British commissioners in the negotiations at Washington to settle
outstanding Anglo-American differences, many of which affected Canada.
One suggestion for a representative from Canada had been Sir John Rose*,
formerly Canada’s finance minister, who had already conducted
discussions on the same topic with American secretary of state Hamilton
Fish. But Rose’s interests were now London and New York and however much
Macdonald trusted him – and that trust went a long way – his
appointment was unacceptable politically. There seemed to be no one else
for this ungrateful task but himself. He left for Washington on
27 February for what he would later describe as the “most difficult and
disagreeable work that I have ever undertaken since I entered Public
Life.”
Macdonald had seen
little of the United States for 20 years, and the commission was his
first extended contact with American statesmen. He was surprised to find
them agreeable socially; that did not make them less dangerous
diplomatically. Of the pressing issues the Alabama claims was
the most serious, but the commission, for the moment, could only agree
to disagree on it. The full weight of negotiations then fell upon the
Canadian inshore fisheries. Free access to those fisheries had ended
when the Reciprocity Treaty lapsed in 1866 and the licensing of American
vessels was now being rigorously enforced [see Peter Mitchell].
Solving this issue became a matter of vital importance to Great
Britain, which hoped to face the military and political consequences of
the Franco-German War without the distraction of Americans being angry
and belligerent. The United States, Macdonald told Tupper, wanted
everything and would give nothing; his British colleagues, especially
Lord de Grey, the chief commissioner, were ready to make Macdonald and
Canada responsible for failure. They wanted a treaty in their pockets
“no matter at what cost to Canada.” Macdonald seriously weighed
resigning as commissioner. De Grey strongly urged him not to, for the
resignation of a plenipotentiary, especially the Canadian
one, would endanger the treaty in the American Senate. Macdonald had
been caught, as he admitted, between the devil and the deep blue sea,
between his role as a British commissioner and as Canadian prime
minister. Britain was so anxious to secure a treaty that, to help
persuade Canada to ratify it, the British accepted Macdonald’s
suggestion that compensation be given by the imperial government for the
Fenian raids, since the Americans had refused to consider any redress
as part of the treaty.
Americans had accepted
Canadian ratification of the treaty only because they thought that
Canada would be a rubber stamp. If the British parliament ratified the
treaty, that was that. As Macdonald put it to Tupper in April, “When
Lord de Grey tells them that England is not a despotic power &
cannot control the Canadian Parlt. when it acts within its legitimate
jurisdiction, they pooh! pooh! it altogether.” On 8 May, with much
misgiving, Macdonald signed the Treaty of Washington.
In Canada he would face
strong opposition from both political parties. He wrote to Rose some
days after the signing, “I think that I would have been unworthy of the
position, and untrue to myself if, from any selfish timidity, I had
refused to face the storm. Our Parliament will not meet until February
next, and between now & then I must endeavour to lead the Canadian
mind in the right direction. You are well out of the scrape.” He put it
more sharply to de Grey: Canadian indignation in June and July was
intense and pervaded all classes – parliament was certain to reject the
treaty. If that happened, Macdonald suggested to Governor General Baron
Lisgar [Young*]
in July, he would leave the government. His colleagues might or might
not carry on without him. If they resigned, and a Liberal government
were formed, it would oppose the treaty lock, stock, and barrel.
The fall of the
Sandfield Macdonald government in Ontario in December 1871 did not augur
well for the treaty, or for Ontario in the next federal election.
Edward Blake*, the new premier, and Alexander Mackenzie,
his lieutenant, both opposed the treaty. It offered Ontario and Quebec
nothing: no compensation from the United States for the Fenian raids on
the Ontario and Quebec borders; free navigation of the St Lawrence for
the Americans in return for the dubious privilege given to Canada of
navigating three rivers in Alaska. The fisheries settlement offended
most areas: Canadian fish would be admitted free to the American market,
but access to the inshore fisheries was to be sold to the Americans for
10 years at a price to be set down by arbitrators. Macdonald had had to
fight to avoid it being set down for 25 years. Scholars in the 1940s
could write about the treaty as an achievement in settling outstanding
issues between Great Britain and the United States; it was another
matter for the prime minister of a country that had to swallow critical
sections of it. In the end, by waiting until May 1872, when Canadian
public opinion had cooled down and the British had offered a guarantee
for Canadian railways as compensation for the Fenian raids, Macdonald
was able to get the treaty through the commons by 121 votes to 55. The
vote did not mean, however, that the hustings had forgotten it.
Nor was this all. Riel
would not go away. He had been got out of the country, but he drifted
back. In the so-called Fenian attack across the Manitoba border in
October 1871, Macdonald suspected him of playing a double game, first
encouraging the leader, William Bernard O’Donoghue*,
and then switching sides when he saw that the raid would be damped down
by the Americans. For that and other reasons Macdonald found
Lieutenant Governor Adams George Archibald’s
shaking hands with Riel in apparent reconciliation unpardonable, and he
wished that Archibald had had his political antennae sensitized by
Ontario’s reaction to the death of Thomas Scott.
These elements combined
to make the general election of August 1872 difficult, even treacherous,
for Macdonald. He did not like to run a government out to full term,
but after Washington an election in 1871 would have been folly. Even now
the timing was not much better. Ontario farmers, he told Colonial
Secretary Lord Carnarvon privately in September 1872, could not
understand why the Maritime provinces should get free admission of fish
to the United States while Ontario got nothing. And Ontario was even
more important politically than before; after the 1871 census,
redistribution gave it 88 seats, six more than it had in 1867. Macdonald
worked at Ontario tenaciously. He went nowhere else (it was still the
custom for ministers to preoccupy themselves with their home provinces),
leaving Quebec to Cartier and Langevin, New Brunswick to Tilley, Nova
Scotia to Tupper, and Manitoba to A. G. Archibald and Gilbert McMicken,
now dominion lands agent in that province. Macdonald also lavished money
on Ontario. He got $6,500 from Conservative friends and received from
Sir Hugh Allan*
some $35,000, plus an emergency draft of $10,000 on 26 August. The day
after, in Toronto, he borrowed $10,000 on his own hook from Charles
James Campbell and John Shedden* at six per cent on a six-month note, a loan that alarmed Conservative campaign manager Alexander Campbell.
By this time Macdonald
was very discouraged. He fought on as best he could, with those reserves
of optimism that he always summoned up when the going was bad. His modus operandi in Ontario is suggested in his dealings with James Simeon McCuaig, mp for
Prince Edward: “Let me tell you that if [Walter] Ross goes in with
money he will stand a great chance of beating you. You must fight him
with the same weapon. Our friends here have been liberal with
contributions, and I can send you $100000 without
inconvenience. You had better spend it between nomination and polling.”
McCuaig lost, and Macdonald got only 42 out of 88 Ontario seats, if
that. In September he estimated his overall majority as 56. That was
high, though how big his majority was depended on the issue. In
April 1873, when Lucius Seth Huntington* broke the first intimations of the Pacific Scandal, it would be 31.
At least three, possibly
four, groups in Canada were interested in the Pacific railway by 1872,
to say nothing of Americans. The main groups were those of Sir Hugh
Allan of Montreal and David Lewis Macpherson of
Toronto. Cartier had conceded in 1871, under opposition pressure and
while Macdonald was ill, that the railway would not be built as a
government enterprise but by a private company. Macdonald tried to bring
the main groups together before, during, and after the election, but
jealousies between Toronto and Montreal and mutual suspicions between
principals made that impossible. In the late autumn of 1872 Allan was
given the task of putting a company together to build the railway.
Macdonald had made only one promise to Allan: the presidency of an
amalgamated Canadian Pacific Railway Company, whenever it was formed.
But there were commitments of which, as yet, Macdonald knew nothing,
notably Cartier’s to Allan in the summer of 1872, that Allan’s group
would be guaranteed the charter and a majority of stock in return for
additional election funding, totalling more than $350,000. When Allan
finally told Macdonald the amount, it seemed so fantastic that he did
not believe Allan, and that fall he wrote to Cartier to confirm it.
Cartier did, more or less; he was then in London fighting Bright’s
disease, which eventually would kill him, in May 1873. There was also
Allan’s commitment to American backers, of which Macpherson had been
suspicious all along.
The Pacific Scandal was
partly scandalous, partly not. All parties used money at election time.
Macdonald would explain to Governor General Lord Dufferin in
September 1873 how Canadian elections went. There were legitimate
election expenses; because of the many rural constituencies, with sparse
populations, these were large. Other expenses, long considered
necessary, were in a half-light, being sanctioned by custom though
technically forbidden by law, for example hiring carriages to take
voters to the polls. Such expenses, in Macdonald’s parliamentary
experience, had never been pressed before an elections committee. No
doubt the $1,000 McCuaig was to spend between nomination and polling day
was partly for carriages. It was also no doubt for other things
Macdonald did not mention: treating the voters could comprehend more
than just carriages and whisky.
The Pacific Scandal
broke in the commons on 2 April 1873. Huntington made a motion calling
for a committee of inquiry and charging that Allan’s original company,
the Canada Pacific Railway Company, had been financed with American
money and that Allan had advanced large sums of money to senior members
of the government in the election. To his charges Macdonald ostensibly
paid no attention; he brought in the members and voted down Huntington’s
motion; he called for a committee of investigation on his own. However,
Conservatives were already uneasy. From then on Macdonald fought a
stubborn, sometimes despairing, but often skilful rearguard action,
hoping to rally his followers and to placate an uncomfortable,
occasionally censorious governor general. But the telegrams published in
Liberal newspapers on 18 July were damning, showing that Macdonald, and
especially Cartier and Langevin, had accepted large sums of money,
actions that were singularly inappropriate since the funds came from a
financier with whom the government was negotiating a major railway
contract.
When parliament met in
late October, Macdonald’s colleagues were confident they would weather
the storm, but almost at once defections began, including that of Donald
Alexander Smith. Macdonald was urged to meet the opposition, to stop
further haemorrhage while there was time. Dufferin and others believed
that had the prime minister forced a vote of confidence early enough, he
might have won by double figures. But Macdonald sank into a lethargy of
gin and despair, waiting, glassy eyed, for some card he feared the
opposition had up their sleeve. Finally, he made a great rallying speech
on the night of 3 November, but he had been outgeneralled by fear and
had left it too late. He and his government resigned 36 hours later, on
the 5th.
Macdonald was in some
ways glad to be out of it. He went to caucus the day after his
resignation and offered to retire as leader, half hoping the members
would accept, half fearing an abrupt plunge into private life. Caucus
would have none of it. Perhaps retirement was not in his nature. When he
was ill in 1870 Joseph Howe had suggested that he should retire to the
bench, as chief justice of the proposed supreme court of Canada [see Sir William Johnston Ritchie].
Macdonald was contemptuous, exclaiming as Under-Secretary of State
E. A. Meredith recorded in his diary, ‘“I wd. as soon go to H–ll!”’
Shortly after New Year’s
Day 1874 the new government of Alexander Mackenzie called an election
and proceeded to wipe the floor with the Tories. Of 206 seats in the
house the Liberals took 138. Macdonald held Kingston, by only 38 votes,
but he was unseated in November on charges of bribery and other
electoral malpractice. Yet the Conservatives’ popular vote overall, even
in this disastrous election, was still 45.4 per cent. Now in opposition
(he was returned in a Kingston by-election), Macdonald needed income to
live on. The money acquired in 1872 had never stuck in his pockets; he
had bled freely with his own money, as well as with the funds of Allan,
C. J. Campbell, Sir Francis Hincks*, and others. He was only five years distant from having been flat broke.
Macdonald’s private life
in the 1850s and 1860s had demanded all his reserves of patience and
sanguineness, hope and resilience. The spring and summer of 1869 marked
its nadir. After a long and dangerous delivery, Agnes gave birth on
8 Feb. 1869 to a hydrocephalic girl, Margaret Mary Theodora, whose
enlarged head undoubtedly contributed to the difficulty of her birth. A
photograph taken in June shows Agnes and Mary; sad it is. Even sadder is
one of mother and daughter in 1893 when Mary was 24. The cost in moral
anguish to both parents can never be known, but any judgement of
Sir John and Agnes should always have Mary in mind. By midsummer 1869 it
was slowly coming to Macdonald – and with what infinite reluctance did
he allow it – that Mary might never be normal. There were always hopes
of some new medical treatment that would allow her to live like anyone
else. It never came. She never did.
In 1869, too, Macdonald
hit the bottom of his personal finances. He had been fighting off that
dénouement for five years. One reason for the elaborate marriage
settlement of 1867 was to protect Agnes against his creditors. The
problem had begun in March 1864 on the death of his law partner,
A. J. Macdonell. In May 1867 an estimated $64,000 (roughly $800,000 at
1988 prices) was jointly owed by Macdonald and the Macdonell estate,
mainly to the Commercial Bank of Canada. As long as it would carry him –
at rates of interest as high as seven per cent – Macdonald could stay
afloat. But in September the bank failed; its assets and liabilities
were taken over by the Merchants’ Bank of Canada. Among the assets was
Macdonald’s debt, which in April 1869 was almost $80,000. Hugh Allan,
president of the Merchants’ Bank, did not press but indicated, when
Macdonald raised the matter, that it would be useful to have the debt
dealt with. The arrangements Macdonald was compelled to make in 1869 are
by no means clear. He borrowed $3,000 from D. L. Macpherson to tide him
over and, with Agnes, took out a mortgage on property at Kingston,
payable to the bank, for $12,000. The money owed him by the Macdonell
estate was largely uncollectable. (When Macdonell’s widow died in 1881,
Macdonald’s Kingston factotum, James Shannon, told him that the estate
still owed him $42,000.) In 1869 a case was pending in Toronto against
Macdonell and Macdonald. It could have been settled out of court in 1865
for $1,000, but Macdonald did not like the counsel for the plaintiffs,
Richard Snelling, whom he thought a shark. Finally Hewitt Bernard, again
acting as a personal aide, was forced to negotiate a settlement in
1872, for $6,100.
At the time of
confederation Macdonald had little income. As prime minister and
minister of justice he earned $5,000 per year. His income from his legal
partnership with James Patton Sr of Toronto, formed in 1864, was $2,700
between 1 May 1867 and 30 April 1868; the next year it was $1,760. What
got Macdonald through was pride, and his friends. Macpherson discovered
how bad Sir John’s position was after Macdonald’s attack of gallstones
in May 1870; he set to work to develop a private subscription. He
thought it unjust that a prime minister could not support and educate
his family on his official income. In the service of his country he had
become poor. By the spring of 1872 some $67,000 had been collected by
Macpherson and invested as the Testimonial Fund, the income of which
Macdonald could use in meeting the ordinary costs of living. Out of it,
presumably, Macdonald’s debt to the Merchants’ Bank would be slowly
discharged. Ever sanguine, in 1876 he told Thomas Charles Patteson of
the Toronto Mail not to be upset at owing money. Treat debts as Fakredeen, in Disraeli’s Tancred, treated his, Macdonald advised: he “caressed them, toyed with them. What would I be without these darling debts.”
After the parliamentary
session of 1874 was over, Macdonald began to feel that perhaps his
fighting days were coming to an end. He sold his Ottawa house in
September 1874 for $10,000 and began plans to move to Toronto, where his
law firm and principal client, the Trust and Loan Company, were now
located. Before he moved, he wanted the dispute over the contested
Kingston election settled; he did not want it known that he would not be
returning to Kingston. He won the by-election at the end of December by
17 votes. He then moved into a house on Sherbourne Street in Toronto,
rented from T. C. Patteson, and a year later into a more fashionable
brick house on St George Street.
Macdonald in 1875 was
determined to lie back, avoid factiousness, and ride the party with a
loose rein. He lay back too much. One Friday in February, when Agnes was
visiting in Niagara, he had been drinking brandy in the Senate bar, and
by 3:00 p.m. he was already drunk. George Airey Kirkpatrick got
him into the house for the speech he had to make. He spoke with
sufficient clarity, though everyone present knew he was “sprung.”
Alexander Mackenzie followed. Macdonald, by now fractious, interrupted
him constantly. Conservatives tried to get him out, but he refused to
go. When he was drunk his temper went awry. Agnes would have kept him
under control; left to himself, as Charles Belford* of the Mail
remarked, “he is helpless as a baby.” She was called home abruptly by
her mother’s death that same evening. Macdonald had reason to try to
turn over a new leaf. He did: he joined the Church of England on
2 March.
It may be well to
confront the legend that Macdonald was a chronic drunkard. He was not.
He was a spasmodic one: now and then, as the dialectic of life and
politics went too savagely against him, or as the sheer strain of
running or some inner compulsion, now beyond analysis, drove him. The
numerous stories may; be exaggerated but cannot be safely denied. A few
examples suggest the general point. During the exertions and the parties
of the Quebec conference of 1864, a friend discovered Macdonald
standing in his room in front of a mirror, dressed in his nightshirt, a
train rug thrown over his shoulder, practising lines from Hamlet.
He was not sober. Such incidents were not always so innocent of effect.
In the late stages of negotiations with the Manitoba delegates in
April 1870, Macdonald, after having been on the wagon for several
months, became quite hors de combat on a Friday, and could not
be got working again until the Monday. He was tired from overwork,
distracted by worries, and demoralized by the sudden death of a friend.
In some ways that combination was typical. Still, it was also true that
Macdonald was ill from gallstones. Perhaps the worst period of drinking
occurred in 1872–73, at the time of the election and Pacific Scandal. In
reviewing the fall of the government, Alexander Campbell told Alexander
Morris*,
lieutenant governor of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, that
Macdonald, “from the time he left Kingston, after his own election,
. . . kept himself more or less under the influence of wine, and . . .
really has no clear recollection of what he did on many occasions at
Toronto and elsewhere after that period.”
Macdonald’s drinking had
been serious enough that when he had consulted Hewitt Bernard about
marrying his sister Agnes, Bernard replied that he had only one
objection. Macdonald promised reformation. Another source said that
Bernard tried to dissuade his sister from the marriage for that reason.
Altogether, there is no doubt that Agnes had some idea of what she was
getting into when she married Macdonald in 1867. And it was easier for
Macdonald to promise reformation than to effect it. His reformations
were spasmodic too. His having joined the Church of England in
March 1875 did not prevent an unpleasant incident at a dinner party in
T. C. Patteson’s house in Toronto some months later. Macdonald got
drunk, insulted Tupper, and finally went dopily upstairs to bed. Agnes
went out the front door, and was still outside, sitting on the gate,
when Patteson looked out at 6:00.a.m. Macdonald’s
political colleagues were philosophical; they would try to get him
where he could sleep it off. Agnes could usually handle him, but, as
this incident shows, not always. Of course people made allowances. His
drinking may not have harmed him all that much in a world that tolerated
a good deal of heavy drinking; it may even have had advantages in an
age when men voted and women did not. What it did to him morally and
physically is difficult to know; and one can only imagine what it did to
Agnes. Some of her feelings surface in her diary.
The internal life of
Macdonald’s second marriage is as much a mystery as most marriages are.
The main difficulty in knowing it is the absence of correspondence
between them. One suspects that Agnes herself was the source of this
hiatus, for she lived on until 1920 and had ample time to destroy not
only Macdonald’s letters to her but hers to him. Agnes was not greatly
popular in Ottawa; she was acutely conscious of her lack of genial
social graces, of deftness and ductility, and she finally seemed to take
refuge in being something of a Tartar in the capital’s society. But one
must never forget her crippled daughter.
By 1875 Macdonald’s law
practice had become rather snarled. His agreement with Patton in 1864
was to last eight years. In the summer of 1871 a new agreement was
drafted with a 20-year term. Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, now 21 and a
law student, was to enter the firm on 1 Nov. 1873. Of the profits from
the Trust and Loan business Macdonald was to have one-third, Patton
two-thirds; of general business Macdonald and his son were to have
one-third, Patton one-third, and a new partner (Robert M. Fleming)
one-third. The agreement defined Macdonald’s participation as
“protecting & advancing the interests of the Firm, using his
influence on their behalf & advising on important questions.” At the
end of 1875 Hugh left the firm to go into practice on his own at
Kingston, partly owing to a row with his father over his engagement to a
young Toronto widow. The correspondence with his son does not show
Macdonald to advantage. A softer and less vigorous edition of the old
man, Hugh was, at least on paper, sweet reasonableness; Macdonald
sounded like a heavy-handed father, gruff and unforgiving. He slowly got
over it. By the end of 1877 Patton wanted out of the partnership.
Evidence of the degree of bitterness is conflicting. Macdonald told
T. C. Patteson on 18 Jan. 1878 that he and Patton were parting, but not
amicably; the next day he told Hugh that any breach had been healed. The
break became effective on 15 April. A formal indenture, dated
15 Oct. 1880, registered what had been a fact for two years.
In January 1877
Macdonald had told Langevin that he would resign the Conservative
leadership when caucus met in Ottawa for the new session. His health
seemed precarious, and he did not like to be an inefficient leader. But
caucus would not hear of his resigning; Macdonald gritted his teeth and
went on. He had already begun to think the Mackenzie government might be
defeated. In the session of February–April 1877 he definitely adopted a
protectionist policy, something he had been drifting toward for some
years. Macdonald had once been a free trader; several of his
Conservative colleagues were still free traders, Macpherson for one. But
Liberals had occupied that terrain. Macdonald had to agree with
Patteson of the Mail, as early as 1872, that the Conservative
party had no option but to “coquet with the Protectionists.” Of course
that wicked word “protection” should never be used, Macdonald told
Macpherson privately in February 1872, but “we can ring the changes of a
National Policy; in paying the United States in their own coin.” In the
summers of 1876–78 he was into political picnics, his hands “full of
these infernal things,” which were nevertheless an efficient means of
popularizing protection and revitalizing his party.
The extent of its
victory in the general election of September 1878 astonished even
Conservatives. Macdonald’s personal defeat in Kingston could not alter
their elation. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, and Quebec
all reversed positions from 1874. The most dramatic change was in
Ontario, where Mackenzie had won 66 of 88 seats in 1874, and where
Macdonald now won 63. Besides the obvious effects of the depression of
the mid 1870s, the temperance question had in Macdonald’s view done the
Liberals great damage in Ontario. At the dominion level Mackenzie had
passed the Canada Temperance Act in April 1878; at the provincial level
Oliver Mowat*’s
Liberal government passed the Crooks Act in 1876, which transferred
authority for liquor licences from the municipalities to a provincial
board. These acts alienated 6,000 licensed hotels and taverns in
Ontario.
Subsequently elected in
both Marquette, Man., and Victoria, B.C., Macdonald judiciously chose to
represent the latter. His cabinet was built that fall from the same
template he used to shape all his cabinets. It reflected Canada’s
national and religious composition and contained representatives of all
six provinces. Making such agglomerations work was the product of
Macdonald’s own peculiar make-up. First, he believed in politeness.
Asking Langevin in 1879 to comment upon an enclosed letter, Macdonald
noted, “What answer shall I send? Let it be soft.” It made no
sense to alienate people, merely for the sake of satisfying a principle,
usually irrelevant. There were times to be tough and exigent: but they
were far less frequent than people thought. If Macdonald returned few
hard answers, he rarely promised, definitely, anything. Agnes had a
frank word with T. C. Patteson on that subject. Patteson was interested
in some office, perhaps for a friend. Agnes made it clear Macdonald was
as costive with her as with everyone else. It was unlikely the office
was already promised. Macdonald did not work that way. But she had no
direct influence. “Of Sir John’s plans & purposes I know nothing,
tho’ the world . . . persists in thinking I do . . . . My lord &
master who in his private capacity simply lives to please & gratify
me . . . is absolutely tyranical in his public life so far as I
am concerned. If I interfere in any sort of way he will be
annoyed. . . . Sir John knows my opinion & wishes on the subject
perfectly well . . . . The other day . . . I expressed it again with
added decision – but Sir John, as is usual with him . . . looked very
benign[,] very gracious, very pleasant – but – answered not one word!” In 1890 Joseph Pope said much the same: Macdonald hated to be boxed in by promises, real or implied.
Under Macdonald
patronage settled into a certain pattern. Nominations came from anyone,
but ministers listened to those from party members of standing,
especially from Conservative mps or a
Conservative who had fought an election and lost. Macdonald would never
concede, and tried to prevent colleagues from conceding, that an mp had any right
to be consulted about appointments. Fundamentally, it was a minister’s
responsibility to decide, and Macdonald rarely interfered. In his own
departmental administration – as minister of justice (1867–73), minister
of the interior (1878–83), superintendent general of Indian affairs
(1878–87), and minister of railways and canals (1889–91) – Macdonald was
cautious about appointments, and he would not have his deputy minister
pushed around by cabinet ministers or mps out for favours for their constituents.
When he himself was
minister of justice, he paid particular attention to the appointment of
judges; to some extent he always would. The argument that Macdonald
never appointed to a judgeship anyone without a substantial record of
party service is not true. Joseph Pope was basically right: Macdonald
was after quality – mind, law, integrity, good health, even address. In
1882 he pushed Alexander Campbell, then justice minister, to appoint
Lewis Wallbridge*
of Belleville, well known to Manitoba lawyers and an old friend, as
chief justice of Manitoba, despite his Grit family connections. “He will
be a good judge,” Macdonald reasoned. “It is so seldom one can indulge
one’s personal feelings with due consideration for public interests.”
Macdonald’s main concern was Wallbridge’s teeth. He could not
contemplate the prospect of a grave chief justice delivering judgement
through a mouthful of black, decaying stumps. Mackenzie Bowell*,
a cabinet minister from Belleville, was set to work to get Wallbridge
to have new teeth. It was a doubtful business, although, as Bowell put
it irreverently, of “gnashing importance.”
The more important the
judgeship, the less was Macdonald willing to let ordinary canons of
patronage prevail. “My rule,” he told one Nova Scotian in 1870, “is to
consider fitness as the first requisite for judicial appointments, and
. . . political considerations should have little or no influence.”
Perhaps the best example of this concern was his appointment of Samuel
Hume Blake* as a vice-chancellor of Ontario. In 1869 he thought the judges of its Court of Chancery, John Godfrey Spragge*
and Oliver Mowat, lacked authority; as Macdonald put it to
J. H. Cameron, equity in Ontario needed heavier metal. He had wanted
Edward Blake; solicited privately, Blake did not accept the offer,
mostly because his private law practice was too lucrative. Macdonald
tried other Liberals and in the end, in 1872, got Blake’s brother to
accept. “There was,” he explained to Patteson, “literally no
Conservative fit for the position who was available.” Macdonald applied
the rule of judicial qualification generally. Bliss Botsford*
was appointed a county court judge in New Brunswick in 1870, even
though he had been an anti-confederate in 1865–66. Timothy Warren
Anglin, a New Brunswick Liberal, noted that appointment and wondered if
there were any possibility for himself. Macdonald answered promptly,
stating that Botsford had been selected on “special recommendation” and
declaring his patronage principles: “I think that in the distribution of
Government patronage we carry out the true Constitutional principle.
Whenever an office is vacant it belongs to the party supporting the
Government if within that party there is to be found a person competent
to perform the duties. Responsible Government cannot be carried on in
any other principle. I am not careful however what a man’s political
antecedents have been, if I am satisfied that he is really and bona fide
a friend of the Government at the time of his appointment. My principle
is, reward your friends and do not buy your enemies.”
In 1878 Macdonald took
on the Department of the Interior portfolio because the west was the
growing edge of the country. By 1881, however, the CPR was taking up so
much of his time and energy that David Mills*,
one of the members of the Liberal opposition with whom he was always
friendly, chided him with having largely left the department “to take
care of itself.” Macdonald was, as he was to admit in 1883, unprepared
in debate and had to “rely on memory and the inspiration of the moment.”
That did not answer with a vigilant opposition. Macdonald was 66 in
1881, and his age was starting to show. He had been ill in 1880 and
during the winter of 1880–81, when the CPR contract was going through
parliament. He managed an expert defence of it in the house on
17 January, but after the session prorogued, on 21 March, he went to
ground, pulse at 49, with liver and abdominal pain. His sister, Louisa,
saw him early in May: “I never saw John looking what I would call old
till this time.” But he made no plans to give up. The CPR and the
National Policy both needed the buttress of another election victory. He
nursed his strength as best he could at home. Charles John Brydges*,
land commissioner of the HBC, found him there on 3 May looking “very
ill indeed” but determined to straighten out an ugly tangle with the HBC
over a contract with the government for Indian supplies. Macdonald put
the blame on Chief Factor John H. McTavish. In 1881 he still cherished
hard memories of the HBC as partly responsible for the Red River
rebellion. But his old friendship with Brydges allowed a sensible
compromise that Brydges had suggested to go forward.
Macdonald by now needed
help with the interior portfolio. D. L. Macpherson had become a minister
without portfolio and government leader in the Senate in 1880, and the
following year an ailing Macdonald began to get him to do the interior
work when he himself was abroad for recovery. Macpherson liked the task
and believed he was good at it. From London in 1881 Macdonald watched
Macpherson taking hold while he tried to build up his energies. Work was
now his only pleasure. He returned to Ottawa in mid September a good
deal more spry. A cartoon by John Wilson Bengough* in Grip
showed him passing his 67th birthday milestone with
“M.DCCC.L.XXX.II. JNO.A. O.K.” carved on it. This well-being was
reflected triumphantly in the general election of June 1882. There were
no major issues, and Canadians gave Macdonald (who was returned in the
eastern Ontario riding of Carleton) nearly as large a majority as he had
had in 1878.
Yet the next nine years
of Macdonald’s life would be a struggle to maintain his own strength,
and that of his cabinet, against old age, illness, incompetence, or
colleagues simply wearing out. Macpherson took over the interior
portfolio officially in 1883 because he and other colleagues saw that
Macdonald was carrying too heavy a load. But Macpherson soon flagged and
was abroad for his own health in 1883 and again in 1884. When a
question about British Columbia lands arose that year, of course
Macdonald had to deal with it. He looked better than most of the cabinet
but claimed that he felt the worst, with the possible exception of John
Henry Pope*.
Although his face and voice did not betray his weakness, he was already
thinking of easing back in the harness, especially when parliamentary
sessions were on. But Tupper’s retirement to England in 1884 as high
commissioner left a gaping hole in the cabinet; a solid and capable
replacement was a matter of urgency. It took a long time. “We want new
blood sadly,” Macdonald told Tupper in February 1885. Campbell and
Archibald Woodbury McLelan* wanted out, Tilley in finance was unwell and was away much of the time, Macpherson and Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau were ill and away, J. H. Pope was sick, John Costigan*
was often drunk. The work fell on Macdonald, that too-willing horse,
and, he admitted to Campbell, “much of it of necessity was ill
done. . . . If we don’t get Thompson I don’t know what to do.” Well
before John Sparrow David Thompson came into cabinet, the Saskatchewan crisis, at the end of March 1885, was fully upon the government.
The issues in the
Saskatchewan River valley were produced by a series of disappointments
and an overstrained administration. The CPR pulled its main line far to
the south in 1882; there were bad harvests in the valley in 1883 and
1884. The territory needed attention from Ottawa and there was no one to
give it. Langevin went west in 1884 but he declined to make a 200-mile
ride across the prairie to hear grievances from disaffected Métis at
Batoche (Sask.) or whites in Prince Albert. In Regina Edgar Dewdney*,
lieutenant governor of the North-West Territories, did the best he
could on skimped budgets and attempted so far as he was able to buffer
Macdonald from difficulties.
Riel’s arrival in the
Saskatchewan valley in July 1884 created a stir among both Métis and
whites. A large petition to Ottawa abort grievances was got up by Riel,
William Henry Jackson*,
and Andrew Spence in December. It was reviewed by Macpherson, now back
on the job. On 28 January the cabinet concluded that it would have to
assess the position of the Saskatchewan Métis, with full enumeration and
probably land scrip in mind. Macdonald, who had always frowned on land
grants and scrip as a solution, did not much like the decision, but he
went along with forming a three-man commission to investigate the claims
of those Métis who were still eligible but had not participated in land
allocation under the Manitoba Act. The news was telegraphed to Dewdney
on 4 February; Riel got it via his cousin Charles Nolin*
four days later. The appointment of a commission was not merely a
shuffle. The government was looking to a strong commission; Macdonald
and Macpherson were weighing up the men for it in early March. Once it
was appointed and working, an insurrection would be pointless and any
settlement of Riel’s personal land claims unlikely.
In late March 1885, by
an extraordinary combination of circumstances, two major problems landed
on Macdonald’s desk at the same time. The outbreak of fighting on the
26th at Duck Lake, between the Métis led by Gabriel Dumont* and a North-West Mounted Police force under Leif Newry Fitzroy Crozier*, occurred on the very day when Macdonald finally told George Stephen*,
president of the CPR, that the cabinet could not approve any further
loan to allow its completion. By the next day it was becoming clear to
Macdonald that the one problem could be made to relieve the other:
further funding could be considered for the CPR because of its value in
moving forces to quell the insurrection [see Sir Frederick Dobson Middleton]. As tactics the solution was brilliant: as government it was desperate.
In these circumstances,
the introduction in April, not of relief for the CPR, but of the
electoral franchise bill, might have seemed quixotic, not to say
foolhardy. But with a rebellion on in the west, it was patent that, as
things stood, whether the CPR survived or not, Macdonald could not win
another general election, which was due within two years. Provinces
controlled their own franchise and dominion elections were based upon
provincially prepared voters’ lists. Because Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
and Ontario were now under Liberal control, it was sensible to consider
having a federal franchise, with federal voters’ lists administered by
county court judges or, where necessary, by local barristers. Macdonald
wanted at least impartiality; he certainly wanted to negate Liberal
partiality. Vigorously defended by Macdonald against a barrage of
opposition attacks, the franchise bill passed in July, near the end of
the session.
In dealing with the CPR,
a private company dependent on the goodwill of the government,
Macdonald could be more cavalier. The CPR was, as he had remarked in
1884, the government’s “sleeping partner (with limited liability).” In
February of that year he suggested to Stephen that, in the war coming
between the Grand Trunk and the CPR, it would be well to strengthen the
latter’s hand in sections of the country. “The CPR must become political
& secure as much Parliamentary support as possible.” Appointments
to the Ontario and Quebec, the railway leased by the CPR from
January 1884, “should all be made political. There are plenty of good
men to be found in our ranks.” In March Macdonald put the question more
jocularly to Henry Hall Smith, the Ontario Conservative organizer. No
one should be working on the CPR who was not – Macdonald used William
Cornelius Van Horne*’s pithy remark – a “fully ‘circumsised”’ Conservative.
Stephen was not an
easy-going confrère. He complained of manifold difficulties, but he did
not always appreciate Macdonald’s. For example, in 1885 the CPR wanted
to institute a land buy-back scheme; being land rich and cash poor, it
would sell some of its land back to the government. The cabinet was
opposed and Macdonald reminded Stephen on 26 May that it had been only
“with very great difficulty” that he himself had gained
acceptance for the loan package devised during the rebellion. “The
majority of our friends in Parlt and all our & your foes
were in favour of the Govt assuming possession of the road, and my
personal influence with our supporters and a plain indication of my
resignation only got them into line. This was done by personal
communication with every one of them . . . . You speak of having to come
back next Session. I hope you have not done so to anyone else. A hint
of that kind getting abroad would be fatal to you.” The CPR aid package,
notice of which had been given by the prime minister on 1 May, was
introduced in the commons on 16 June and passed in July. It is possible
to wonder what would have happened to the CPR had Macdonald not been in
power, or if he and Stephen had not worked together in utmost frankness.
The line to the west coast was completed later in 1885 and in the
summer of 1886 Macdonald travelled overland to British Columbia, his
first trip west. Ironically, during the parliamentary session that
spring the CPR did sell 6.8 million acres, valued at $10.2 million, back
to the government to help repay the loan.
A glimpse of Macdonald’s
personal opinion about one of the most dramatic episodes of the
North-West rebellion, Riel’s trial and execution, emerges from his
correspondence with his trusted friend, judge J. R. Gowan, now retired
from the bench, whom Macdonald had appointed to the Senate in
January 1885. Macdonald confessed to him on 4 June 1885, two weeks after
Riel was captured, that if Riel were convicted “he certainly will be
executed but in the present natural excitement people grumble at his not
being hanged off hand.” When the question of clemency for Riel arose
after his conviction in August, Gowan’s legal and political view was
much the same as Macdonald’s. It would be, he told Macdonald in
September, “a fatal blunder to interfere with the due course of law in
his case. The only plea he could urge was urged for him at the trial and
found against him.” Macdonald’s correspondence on this touchy subject
is thin, but Gowan’s letter to him of 18 November, two days after Riel
was hanged, reveals Macdonald’s perception clearly enough: “From what
you wrote me I did not doubt the result but I felt most uneasy to the
last knowing how public men are often obliged to take a course they do
not individually approve. The fact may affect you prejudicially with
Lower Canada but looking at the subject with all anxiety to see the
wisest course for you to take I felt it would have been an act of
political insanity to yield, simply because the man was of French
blood.” Thus, although it is sometimes averred that Macdonald sacrificed
Riel to Ontario opinion, that is the truth inside out. Riel was a
victim of the law. One way out might have been to bend before Quebec
opinion. The furia francese spent its force eventually, but not
without political damage. Though he won a comfortable majority in the
federal election of February 1887, Macdonald lost ground in Quebec;
provincially, the Conservatives lost control of Quebec to Liberal leader
Honoré Mercier.
The west, after the
rebellion, went on to become prosperous, with ranches, railways,
immigration, and wheat. Ontario, on the other hand, took up fear of
Catholicism and the French; Quebec took up fear of Protestants and the
English. Anti-Catholicism had spilled northward from the United States,
where a strong nativist movement arose in the late 1880s; but there was
plenty of Protestant tinder in Ontario always ready for a satisfying and
warming blaze, and Toronto’s Protestant papers took fire after
Mercier’s Jesuits’ Estates Act was given royal assent in July 1888 [see Christopher William Bunting].
Protestant Ontario demanded disallowance, claiming papal intrusion into
a settlement between the Jesuits and the province of Quebec (the
estates’ owner since confederation), but Macdonald and the minister of
justice, Sir John Thompson, thought the act should stand. The Protestant
“equal rights” uproar followed in March 1889 [see Daniel James Macdonnell]. William Edward O’Brien*, mp for
Muskoka, told Macdonald that he would move in the commons that the
Jesuits’ Estates Act be disallowed. Macdonald said he regretted such a
motion but, he added in a typical gesture, he would be sorry if any
Conservative should feel bound to separate from the party merely because
he had voted for O’Brien’s motion. He told William Bain Scarth*,
his right-hand man in Manitoba and mp for Winnipeg, to leave “equal
rights” severely alone. Many Conservatives might take it up but
Macdonald felt they “will be all right at election time. There is no use
of reminding them of their mistake. It might, such is the perversity of
human nature, have the effect of making them stick to their cry.”
Macdonald had little stomach for recriminations.
In the commons debate in 1889 on disallowance, Thompson walked into O’Brien’s outspoken ally D’Alton McCarthy
with a cool, polite, but infuriating logic. Thompson was appalled at
the sheer impolicy of the motion in a country like Canada, which was 40
per cent Catholic. Macdonald admired his performance but for one thing:
it was too good. Thompson had angered McCarthy. Macdonald was thinking
of a day when O’Brien and McCarthy, both Conservatives, would cool off
and return to the party. Thompson had perhaps reduced that possibility.
The government’s overwhelming majority against disallowance, 188 to 13,
was due not only to parliament’s revulsion at McCarthy’s argument but
also to the French Canadians on the Conservative side having been told
to keep quiet and let the common sense of the anglophone members
prevail. Nevertheless, Macdonald did not like the drift of things.
Canada, he told Gowan in July 1890, as a just punishment for ingratitude
for the blessings that had been heaped upon it, was heading into
trouble. “The demon of religious animosity which I had hoped had been
buried in the grave of George Brown has been revived. . . . McCarthy has
sown the Dragons teeth. I fear they may grow up to be armed men.”
On the Manitoba school
question, which grew out of “equal rights,” Macdonald agreed in 1890
with both Thompson and Edward Blake – the decision about the
constitutionality of Manitoba’s abolition of public funding for Catholic
schools was best left to the courts, not to the House of Commons. He
who had been so free with disallowing provincial legislation to protect
the CPR from Manitoba [see John Norquay*] or with Ontario over the Rivers and Streams Act [see John Godfrey Spragge], now capitulated to basic good sense. If Manitoba’s school legislation was ultra vires, the courts would so declare it. If it were intra vires, what was the point of disallowance?
By 1890 many of Macdonald’s colleagues had died off or retired, some of them too young. Thomas White* died in 1888 at age 58, having won golden opinions as minister of the interior; Macdonald loved him like a son. John Henry Pope
died in 1889; Macdonald mourned him as a trusted and salty companion.
Others went to pasture: Tilley to Government House in Fredericton in
1885, Sir Alexander Campbell to Government House in Toronto in 1887. The
weaknesses of Sir Adolphe-Philippe Caron*,
the minister of militia and defence, seemed to grow more apparent, as
did Secretary of State Chapleau’s thirst for a portfolio with blood in
it. Macdonald had acquired younger men, enthusiastic and hardworking,
but not very experienced: John Graham Haggart*, Charles Carroll Colby, George Eulas Foster, and Charles Hibbert Tupper*. They were awkward colleagues to handle sometimes, especially young Tupper, mp for
Pictou, N.S., and minister of marine and fisheries from 1888 to 1894.
He had much of the talent and all of the bumptiousness of his father.
One of Tupper’s importunate requests Macdonald endorsed with “Dear
Charlie, Skin your own skunks. JAMD.” In a characteristic argument in
1889 Tupper took exception to Conservative friends in Pictou being
ignored in a coal contract for the Intercolonial Railway. Macdonald,
then in charge of railways and canals, reminded him that chief engineer
Collingwood Schreiber*
was responsible for the contract. Schreiber had no other interest than
doing his duty. You can, Macdonald told Tupper, “throw all the blame on
me, if you like.” Still, he prefaced his letter with a touch of
jocularity. “I see we must find you a seat where there are no coal
mines, or we shall have annual trouble.”
Foster also had a
difficulty, though it was not with his Department of Finance. Macdonald
was distressed over Foster’s marriage to Adeline Chisholm [Davies*]
in 1889. Her husband had deserted her and she had eventually got a
divorce in Illinois. In a letter to former governor general
Lord Lansdowne [Petty-Fitzmaurice*],
now in India, Macdonald was frank. Mrs Foster would be shunned by
Ottawa society, he said, and Rideau Hall would be closed to her. Foster
would be stung to death in the next session of parliament. “But,”
Macdonald added, “as Sir Matthew Hale long ago said, ‘There is no wisdom
below the belt.”’ Macdonald judged wrong. If Lady Macdonald refused to
see Mrs Foster, Lady Thompson [Affleck*] would and did see her, and in 1893 Sir John Thompson persuaded Governor General Lord Aberdeen [Hamilton-Gordon*] and Lady Aberdeen [Marjoribanks*] that the nonsense had gone on long enough.
Macdonald’s heir
apparent, after Sir Charles Tupper went to London in 1884 and McCarthy
refused to enter the cabinet, had been Sir Hector-Louis Langevin. He had
been groomed to replace Sir George-Étienne Cartier, upon whom Macdonald
had relied so much. Cartier had been his Quebec lieutenant, respected,
listened to, and with real authority. He had also been Macdonald’s right
hand in the commons, taking over the running of it when Macdonald was
away. To this double role Langevin might have succeeded, but he was
never really capable of filling either part of it. The political control
of Quebec he was forced to share, reluctantly, with others. Hardworking
in his department (Public Works), he was the senior minister but,
despite Macdonald’s urging, he seemed never quite to rise to mastering
the general business of the house. He remained senior minister but by
1890 Thompson had become Macdonald’s real lieutenant. He and Macdonald
got on well together; he wrote admirable state papers and shouldered a
great deal of the work. Macdonald was nevertheless devoted to Langevin,
who had stood by him through many a dark hour. And he had always let
tried and experienced ministers run their own departments. The obverse
was that he could be caught by that trust. Of Joseph-Israël Tarte*,
Caron, and others, who by 1890 were bringing Macdonald allegations of
wrongdoing in Langevin’s department, Macdonald could only ask, what
could he do? It was perhaps his inkling of a scandal involving Langevin
and mp Thomas McGreevy,
if not its details, that made him look early in 1891 for reasons to
dissolve parliament. He now lived, according to Gowan, in daily fear
that the searchlight would be applied to Langevin’s department.
Macdonald was not at all sure his government would survive.
The election of
March 1891 would be fought on patriotic grounds, by meeting head on the
Liberal call for unrestricted reciprocity with the United States. It was
apparent to Macdonald that the American secretary of state, James
Gillespie Blaine of Maine, was an expansionist interested in taking over
Canada. Macdonald could strike the patriotic note hard. Asked for a
dissolution, Governor General Lord Stanley* was more than a little dubious about using, as a weapon of political war, the proofs of a pamphlet by journalist Edward Farrer*
on how American policies could be devised for driving Canada into
annexation, but, with the Liberals getting the Langevin scandal hot and
ready to serve, Macdonald did not want another session of parliament
without an election first. He did not hesitate, in an enthusiastic
address in Toronto on 17 February, to colour Liberal schemes of
unrestricted reciprocity as fundamentally annexationist. Macdonald’s
famous remark in his electoral address on the 7th of that month, “I am a
British subject and British born, and a British subject I hope to die,”
has to be read more as an expression of Canadian nationalism than as
any lofty imperial sentiment. Indeed as early as 1884 he was looking to
the day when Britain (now a rather “shaky old Mother,” as he saw her)
would be taken care of by her growing children. That year he was sorry
to see New South Wales throwing over the chance to have an Australian
federation; Canada and Australia together would have work to do ere long
helping the mother country, he said in a letter to Gowan. But in 1889
cabinet expressed only mild interest in his proposals for a conference
with the “Australasian Colonies” and, perhaps following the lead of
business, the possibility of trade relations.
Parliament opened at the
end of April 1891 and on 11 May Tarte moved for the Langevin–McGreevy
investigation. The next day, in an interview with the governor general,
Macdonald suffered a slight stroke. Neither Thompson nor Lord Stanley
liked the look of it; the election, which had produced a reduced
Conservative majority, had taken a great deal out of Macdonald.
Nevertheless, he rallied and in ten days was back in that all too
familiar and sweaty harness at the Department of Railways and Canals,
dealing, once more, on 22 May, with C. H. Tupper’s importunities. It was
almost the last business Macdonald did. Tupper wanted a policeman to
control the crowds at the Pictou railway station when the trains came
in. Macdonald patiently sent the letter to Schreiber, who replied that
he could not believe the good people of Pictou had suddenly become all
that uncontrollable! Few could know how toilsome were Macdonald’s
working days. Behind a life that seemed full of achievement and great
projects were a mountain of detail, piles of paper, and long days of
aching routines. In these last weeks, working in his department and in
cabinet, he tried to keep his strength, avoiding late-night sittings of
the house. He was chagrined at a ministerial defeat on 21 May on a
motion to adjourn, by a vote of 65 to 74, because Conservative members
were at dinner parties given by Chapleau and Dewdney. Such a defeat had
not happened to Macdonald before, in 13 years of office. He himself had
to come into the house. This defeat and the Langevin scandal gave the
opposition new life and vigour.
Macdonald went the other
way. While he was in bed recovering from a cold, a severe stroke
overtook him on the afternoon of 29 May. He never spoke again. He died a
week later, in the evening of 6 June 1891. There was a great state
funeral in Ottawa and he was buried in Cataraqui Cemetery, near
Kingston, beside his parents, his first wife, his sisters, and his
long-dead child.
Under Macdonald’s will,
dated 4 Sept. 1890, rights of administration were given to Edgar
Dewdney, Frederick White (a former secretary), and Joseph Pope, his
secretary since 1882. The three men were, with Agnes, the official
guardians of Mary, who would live until 1933. All of Macdonald’s real
estate and property in Ottawa (mainly Earnscliffe, the family’s home
since 1883) went to Agnes free of rent. Her current income was provided
by her marriage settlement and by the testimonial gift of $67,000
presented to the Macdonalds in 1872. Macdonald’s two insurance policies,
each worth £2,000, were to be invested for the benefit of Hugh John,
who also received some estate and stock left to Sir John by his sister,
Louisa. Not counting the Earnscliffe property, Macdonald left about
$80,000 plus the Testimonial Fund income.
Macdonald had an
elasticity of mind and range of information rare in Canada and unusual
anywhere. He joined to that a huge and irreverent sense of humour. He
wore the dignity of his office, well and good; he had style, manners,
and vocabulary, but they were often a mask and the real Macdonald would
show through it, especially if he caught the eye of an old friend. With
his friends, he rarely worried about being what later Victorians might
have called respectable. He was never a later Victorian anyway. When his
affairs were in a tangle, when he was depressed, when he was unable to
put things off, he might get drunk: more often he would open up the
truth in conversation. He often discovered that talk suggested, to his
fertile mind, some way of escape. He had enormous Patience.
Sir Alexander Campbell, his old law partner and long a colleague,
marvelled at it. To A. W. McLelan of Nova Scotia he gave the impression,
even in 1889, that there were reserves of power yet unused.
J. R. Gowan reflected
that of Macdonald’s great aspirations, of his nobility of aim, there
could be no doubt. But if Macdonald thought of the ends, he was
insufficiently concerned with the means. The public service was
affected. Lord Lansdowne, in India, was not surprised at the Langevin
revelations, however much he was fond of Macdonald. In his own
departments Macdonald would not tolerate a slack or disobedient deputy
minister and he would back a fair and judicious official such as
Schreiber in railways or a cabinet minister of the calibre of Thompson.
But often he had to work with lesser men, of doubtful integrity or
dubious intelligence. He may have trusted them too much, or his own
capacity for using them. “A good carpenter,” he told T. C. Patteson in
1874, “can work with indifferent tools.” On 19 June 1891 the Montreal Star
observed that as long as he was there, it did not much matter who was
in the cabinet: “His infinite capacity for getting well out of any
scrape that his friends got him into . . . [was] such as would have
inspired confidence in a government composed of Montreal aldermen had he
been at the head of it.” Macdonald’s protean mind, his resourcefulness,
his reserves of doggedness when the going was really rough – all gave
him tremendous depth and resilience. He calls to mind an aphorism by
Talleyrand, “The stability of complicated natures comes from their
infinite flexibility.” This quality could mean timidity, as with George
Eulas Foster. Yet he was never a prig; his sense of humour could be
wicked, and he loved old, even gamy friends and associations. It could
also mean a tenderness that was both charming and touching. In
April 1891 Tilley, his old finance minister, wrote from New Brunswick
asking if he could continue for a while longer as lieutenant governor;
if he stepped down, his and his wife’s combined income would not be
enough for them to live on. He would have to eat up his capital, and
this, though Tilley did not say so, after 12 years of public service to
New Brunswick and 24 to Canada. Macdonald sent the letter on to Foster,
the New Brunswick minister in cabinet, endorsing it, “My dear Foster,
This is a sad letter. . . . We must leave him in Govt House as long as
possible.” Foster agreed. Tilley stayed until 1893.
The truth was, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes Macdonald had endured, he enjoyed his métier.
He remembered faces and places, associations and names, and he kept
them alive in mind and practice with an enormous and often personal
correspondence. He listened to everyone, and led all to think that he
set great store by their information. His own letters are a marvellous
treasure: trenchant, whimsical, full of pith and substance, salt and
savour – the way he was. “He was the father and founder of his country,”
said Sir John Thompson in 1891 in a rare interview, “there is not one
of us who . . . had not lost his heart to him.” Even Liberals were not
without grudging admiration; Conservatives, in parliament, in the
country, loved the Old Man and at his death they mourned for him as if
he had been taken from their very firesides.
[The main manuscript source for this study is the Macdonald papers at
NA, MG 26, A. The letter-books, copious for the late 1860s and early
1870s, are particularly useful. Other important collections at the NA
are the papers of Sir James Robert Gowan (MG 27, I, E17), Henry Hall
Smith (MG 27, I, I19), Sir George Stephen (MG 29, A30), Sir John
Thompson (MG 26, D), and Sir Charles Tupper (MG 26, F). At the AO are
the papers of Sir Alexander Campbell (MU 469–87), Alexander Morris (ms
535), T. C. Patteson (ms 22), and W. B. Scarth (ms 77). Also useful are
the Langevin papers at the ANQ-Q (P-134) and the Williamson papers at
the QUA (2259).
Leading printed sources are Sir Joseph Pope’s edition of the Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald . . . (Toronto, 1921), still valuable after nearly 70 years, and the more detailed and modern Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald . . . ,
in two volumes covering the period from 1836 to 1861, edited by
J. K. Johnson and C. B. Stelmack (Ottawa, 1968–69). A collection of
Macdonald family correspondence, also edited by Johnson, has been
published as Affectionately yours; the letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and his family (Toronto, 1969). Other major primary materials include Can., Prov. of, Parl., Confederation debates, and Pope’s Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald, G.C.B., first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada (2v., Ottawa, [1894]).
There are several biographies of Macdonald. One that must be mentioned here is Donald Grant Creighton*’s two-volume study, Macdonald, young politician and Macdonald, old chieftain.
It is unforgettable, splendid, but flawed. Creighton makes daring
assumptions not only in his description of Macdonald but also in his
reading of characters in apposition. Nevertheless, it is probably the
greatest Canadian biography yet published in English. Other useful works
are P. B. Waite’s Macdonald: his life and world (Toronto and New York, 1975) and his Life and times of confederation; J. K. Johnson’s “John A. Macdonald” in The pre-confederation premiers: Ontario government leaders, 1841–1867, ed. J. M. S. Careless (Toronto, 1980), 197–245, “John A. Macdonald, the young non-politician,” CHA Hist. papers, 1971: 138–53, and “John A. Macdonald and the Kingston business community,” To preserve & defend: essays on Kingston in the nineteenth century,
ed. G. [J. J.] Tulchinsky (Montreal and London, 1976), 141–55; and
W. R. Teatero, “John A. Macdonald learns – articling with George
Mackenzie,” Historic Kingston, no.27 (1979): 92–112. j.k.j. and p.b.w.]
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