John A Read online

  John A. Macdonald (c. 1863) by William Sawyer, based on an earlier photograph. Here this Kingston artist projects a sensual quality unmatched in any other portrait of Macdonald.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 Lairds Ourselves

  2 A Boy’s Town

  3 The Right Time to Be a Scot

  4 Horse Dealing, Tavern Keeping and the Law

  5 A Conservative in a Conservative Country

  6 Going Headlong

  7 New Guys with New Ideas

  8 A Short Time before the Long Game

  9 Enlarging the Bounds

  10 Forms Are Things

  11 The Double Shuffle

  12 Isabella, Hugh John and Daisy

  13 Double Majority

  14 The Shield of Achilles

  15 Canada’s First Anti-American

  16 The Will to Survive

  17 Irreplaceable Man

  18 A Pact of Trust

  19 Parliament vs the People

  20 The Administration of Strangers

  21 The Turn of the Screw

  22 The Man of the Conference

  23 Two Unions

  Map of Canada, 1867

  24 Idea in the Wilderness

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To Carol

  My wife, and my love

  Introduction

  The spirit of past ages never dies—

  It lives and walks abroad and cries aloud.

  Susanna Moodie, Victoria Magazine, 1847

  If an international competition were ever to be staged to identify the world’s most complex and contradictory country, Canada would be a serious contender. The winner, surely, would be India, with its sixteen official languages and more than two hundred local languages, its sacred cows and cutting-edge computer software, its combination of being both the world’s largest democracy and the only nation-state with a caste system. Canada might well come in second. It’s become a commonplace to describe the country as “the world’s first postmodern country,” given its unparalleled ethnic diversity, its decentralization (exceeded, if at all, only by Switzerland and Belgium), the in-rush of immigrants (the largest proportionately among developed nations), the expanding population of Aboriginal peoples (second only to New Zealand), and the ever-increasing number of “nations” within the nation-state—Quebec as the latest to join the list.

  In quite a few ways, we were postmodern before we ever became modern. That was the way we were in John A. Macdonald’s time. In 1884, Goldwin Smith, the leading political commentator of his day, summarized Macdonald’s lifelong mission as “to hold together a set of elements, national, religious, sectional and personal, as motley as the component patches of any ‘crazy quilt,’ and actuated each of them by paramount regard for its own interest.” Here, Smith identified exactly Macdonald’s supreme talent—that he knew how to herd cats.

  No one else in Canada came close to Macdonald; after him, perhaps only Mackenzie King did, his paramount art being that of doing as little as possible for as long as possible. At the time, few others anywhere could match him. Even without the spur of chauvinism, any reasonable ranking of nineteenth-century democratic leaders would be Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, John A. Macdonald. (Otto von Bismarck, no democrat, would otherwise rank near to the top.) Macdonald happened to perform on a stage that was small and threadbare. But in the primordial political tasks—the managing of men (then, only them) and the winning of their hearts and minds, and so their votes—contemporary equals are not easy to identify. Nor were there many nation-builders like him in his day: Bismarck, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Simón Bolívar. His achievement may have been the more demanding because none of the others had to create a country out of a crazy quilt.

  Within the range of Macdonald’s accomplishments, there are sizable gaps. The largest, surely, is that, unlike Lincoln, he never appealed to people’s “better angels.” He was a doer, not a thinker, although highly intelligent and omnivorously well read. He lacked the certitudes of a moralist, instead taking human nature as he found it and turning it to his purposes. He was, that is, a very Scottish Scot. He of course drank too much. And although he was in no way the first to use patronage and election funds for partisan purposes—a cherished and well-embedded Canadian tradition (which still thrives)—Macdonald gave the practice credibility and durability by his masterful exercise of it. That’s a shoddy legacy for the father of a country to leave behind.

  Yet his accomplishments were staggering: Confederation above all, but almost as important, if not more so, extending the country across the continent by a railway that was, objectively, a financial and economic insanity. Also, the National Policy of tariff protection, which endured in one form or other into the 1980s. And the RCMP or, more exactly, its precursor, the North-West Mounted Police. The first immigration from outside the British Isles, and Canada’s first labour legislation. On the ledger’s other side, he was responsible for the CPR scandal, for the execution of Louis Riel and for the head tax on Chinese workers.

  He’s thus not easy to scan. His private life was largely barren. Yet few other Canadian leaders—Pierre Trudeau, John Diefenbaker for a time, Wilfrid Laurier—had the same capacity to inspire love. One MP—a Liberal—wrote in a magazine article of Macdonald’s hold on his supporters: “They would go through fire and water to serve him, and got, some of them, little or no reward. But they served him because they loved him, and because with all his great powers they saw in him their own frailties.” The novelist Hugh MacLennan, in his Scotchman’s Return, caught many of the layers within him: “This frail-looking man with the immense and rueful patience of a Celt…. This utterly masculine man with so much woman in him…this lonely man flashing gay out of his inner solitude…this statesman who understood that without chicanery statesmanship is powerless.” Macdonald was as complex and contradictory as his own country.

  Add a last, lesser, legacy of Macdonald’s to the list. In writing this book, I have made a host of spelling “mistakes,” but have paid them no heed. Each has been signalled clearly by a red line that my computer’s U.S. text system inserts beneath the offending word. The mistakes aren’t really mine, though; they are Macdonald’s. He had an order-in-council passed directing that all the government’s papers be written in the British style, as with “labour” rather than “labor.”

  Discoveries of this kind have been for me one of the chief delights of writing this book, and even more so of researching it. All historians, professional or freelance like myself, are keenly aware that these small epiphanies are the joy that more than compensates for the later pain of trying to transfer from mind to computer screen whatever it is one wants to say. The discovery, for instance, that, at least in parts of nineteenth-century rural Canada, unmarried mothers were often regarded far less as sinners than as a “species of heiress” as one observer noted, their condition both confirmed their fecundity and, as dowry, they brought children who would soon be able to work on the farm. The discovery, one of slightly grander moment, that the principal reason the Confederation Fathers spent almost no time discussing the respective powers of the national and provincial governments—the obsession of our politicians ever since—was that most Canadians then were self-sufficient farmers (even making their own clothes and soap and candles) and didn’t want governments to do much for them or to them. The discovery, most substantial of all, that the single most important decision Canadians made in the nineteenth century was not to become a confederation, but, rather, not to become Americans. And the discovery that th
e National Policy, a phrase always applied only to Macdonald’s policy of tariff protection for Canadian manufacturers, began instead with Confederation itself, with tariff protection as a later sub-policy, together with other highlights such as his building a transcontinental railway.

  Macdonald made us by making a confederation out of a disconnected, mutually suspicious collection of colonies, and by later magnifying this union into a continental-sized nation. He could not have brought off Confederation without the others of the “Big Four”—George-Étienne Cartier, George Brown and Alexander Tilloch Galt. Among them, though, the irreplaceable man was Macdonald. He understood as well something more fundamental. The United States had emerged from its Civil War as a putative superpower. Britain, the global superpower, wanted to pull back from North America in order to attend to its empire. For Canada to survive on its own, it had to demonstrate that it possessed the will and nerve it took for a nation to survive. Confederation was the essential means to that end. What Macdonald understood as no other, excepting perhaps Galt, was that Confederation was only a means, not an end.

  I began work knowing precious little about Macdonald and his times. What I knew was negative—that while Macdonald was the most important of all our prime ministers, the last full-scale, critical, biography of him had been written more than half a century ago. It is the greatest biography in Canadian historiography—Donald Creighton’s two volumes The Young Chieftain and The Old Politician, published in 1952 and 1955. They are magisterial and encyclopedic, composed with narrative flair. But times move on, new evidence emerges, attitudes and assumptions change and open doors—maybe trap doors—to new interpretations of old givens. Anyway, why should the United States, where history was once dismissed as “bunk,” each year publish up to a half-dozen biographies of historical figures or major studies of past doings that attempt to extract contemporary lessons from long-ago events, while Canada settles for so few—precariously close to none at all? Our history, as we know perfectly well, lacks the drama of revolutions and civil wars, of kings and queens losing their heads. But it is our history. It is us. It’s where we came from and, in far larger part than often is recognized, it is why we are the way we are now, no matter all the transformational changes since—demographic, economic, technological, lifestyle. Moreover, as was always Macdonald’s core conviction, human nature itself changes little.

  I came to this biography sideways. This book started out to be a slim one, then threatened to grow obese, then was sliced into two more or less manageable halves. This is to say that I began boning up on Macdonald for a Brief Life series on historical figures for another publisher. Out of this cramming came one, to me, unarguable conclusion: Macdonald deserves a new full-scale biography, and Canadians deserve the chance to rediscover him. With quite considerable daring—in Canada, history really is often now treated as “bunk”—Random House of Canada accepted the challenge, eventually taking the double dare that an originally planned single volume should be divided into two. This book is the result of that dare.

  A last note on my work habits. Early on, Carol, my wife, found a large poster of Macdonald created originally to promote Macdonald’s cause in CBC-TV’s The Greatest Canadian contest. She installed it in my attic office. Throughout my labours, he’s looked down, quizzically and mischievously.

  ONE

  Lairds Ourselves

  Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man. Helen Macdonald’s judgment on her eldest son

  Where John A. Macdonald was born and when he was born are unknown. Or, rather, are not known exactly. About the essentials of his beginnings, there are no doubts whatever. He was born in the Scottish industrial city of Glasgow in 1815.

  There were historical dimensions to both place and date. Glasgow was the lustiest child of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: a sleepy town of only twenty thousand in 1791, its shipyards along the Clyde, its engineering works and factories and its “dark Satanic mills” had sent the town’s population soaring above one hundred thousand by the time of Macdonald’s birth, less than a quarter-century later. As well, 1815 was the year of the Battle of Waterloo. That cataclysmic military clash didn’t so much ensure Napoleon’s defeat (which was inevitable eventually, anyway) as ensure that Britain, its strength multiplied by its long industrial lead over all its rivals, would become the global powerhouse of the nineteenth century. By pure happenstance, Britain’s global reach created a possibility that its leftover colonies in North America, strung across the top half of the continent like widely spaced and oddly sized beads, and having little in common other than their mutual Britishness (for the most part), might yet—just—remain independent from their overwhelming neighbour, the coming hegemon of the twentieth century. For that to actually happen, however, required the arrival of a leader who could cajole and bluff and bully these colonies into becoming a whole larger than the sum of their parts. In 1815, little of this was of the slightest interest to anyone in the British Isles. Yet it was in Glasgow in that year that Canada’s future began to take shape.

  The minutiae of Macdonald’s birth need to be cleared up. Throughout his life and for the near century and a quarter that has followed his death, his birthdate has been commemorated as January 11, 1815—as in the joyous celebratory dinner staged each year in Kingston, Ontario, for example, and in the inscriptions on all the plaques and statues that honour him. But this particular day may be a mistake. The January 11 date is taken from the entry for his birth made by his father, Hugh Macdonald, in his memorandum book. The entry recorded in the General Register Office in Edinburgh, though, is January 10.*1 Similarly, precision about where specifically Macdonald was born, while a matter of lesser consequence, is as difficult to determine. The delivery may have taken place at 29 Ingram Street in Glasgow or, not far away, at 18 Brunswick Street, both on the south side of the Clyde River, because the family moved between these locations around the time of his birth. To pick at a last unknowable nit, Macdonald’s father recorded the moment of birth as 4:15, without specifying afternoon or early morning.

  The other defining attributes of Macdonald’s birth are known beyond argument. His parents were middle class, if precariously so. They were Scots, and so of course was he. And soon after his birth, they chose to immigrate to Canada rather than take the advice of Samuel Johnson about the most attractive prospect that any Scotsman could ever come upon and follow the usual road to London.

  Immigration always happens for one of two reasons or for both simultaneously: either individuals or families are pushed out from their homeland by poverty, oppression, failure or plain bad luck, or they are pulled towards a new country by the tantalizing promise it holds for new beginnings and new opportunities. Both factors applied to the Macdonalds, but in distinctive ways, when they set out across the Atlantic in 1820. John A. himself was then five years old. An early biographer described him as having “a bright eye, a lively manner and a head of curly brown hair which darkened into black as he grew up.” At least supposedly, he showed early promise of having the gift of the gab, once giving a speech to a gathering of relatives by mounting a table, from which, as his gestures became ever more dramatic, he projected himself to the ground.

  As soon as the Napoleonic wars ended, England was gripped by a depression that cut most deeply into its farming counties; the same outwards push existed in Scotland, given force there by the clearances of people from the land to make way for sheep—as often, despite later myth, by Scottish landowners as by English ones. The great migration from the British Isles to both Canada and the United States dates from this period, although it remained relatively small until the 1830 s, later multiplying exponentially through the 1840 s as the Irish fled from the horrors of their Great Famine. To magnify the force of the outwards push, the British governments of the day accepted the thesis of Thomas Malthus that population growth would always outpace the growth in food production. To avoid social unrest, perhaps even the ultimate horror of a revolution of the kind from which Na
poleon had sprung, successive governments encouraged the “idle poor” to move elsewhere.

  The Macdonalds, though, were not a family of farmers. And although hard up, they weren’t poor, not in the sense of their being malnourished and in rags. The force that pushed them out was failure—quite unnecessary failure, and the product almost entirely of the fecklessness of Macdonald’s father, Hugh.

  Before Hugh Macdonald is introduced, it’s necessary to go backwards one further genealogical step to Hugh’s own father, John Macdonald. Although he never left Scotland, John Macdonald set the family on its transatlantic journey. When he came down from the Highlands—pushed out by the clearances implemented by his laird, the Duke of Sutherland—he went first to a little village in the Strathfleet Valley and then on to the Sutherlandshire town of Dornoch, where he set up as a shopkeeper. John Macdonald was widely liked—a contemporary described him as having “a tender nature, full of humour, a quick and winning manner, with a bow and smile for everyone he met.” Many of those qualities would pass to his grandson, as did his longevity, for he died at the age of eighty-six. John Macdonald’s most distinctive legacy to his grandson was his head of abundant but curiously crinkly hair. His most important legacy to his heirs, though, was to get them out of the beautiful but bleak Highlands into a settled community, and to raise them there to at least the lower rungs of the middle class.

  Hugh Macdonald squandered the greater part of what had been handed down to him. Born in Dornoch,*2 he moved in early adulthood to the growing city of Glasgow and there owned and operated a succession of small enterprises—one, for instance, making bandanas. Their common characteristic was that they all failed. Hugh was known as a decent, amiable man, good in conversation and impossible to dislike. This quality served him well: after one bankruptcy, when he was at serious risk of being sent to a debtors’ prison, he was allowed not only to remain free but to keep his library and household effects, later selling them to pay for the tickets for his transatlantic passage. Two attributes that Hugh passed on to his son were that he had a hot, Celtic temper, and that he drank a lot.