by John Boyko
The only ray of hope for Britain was that Louis Napoleon had been successful in his Mexican adventure. French troops had taken Mexico City in June 1863. The bold—or perhaps reckless—move was an affront to America’s Monroe Doctrine, as it re-introduced a European power into the western hemisphere. It was, however, welcomed by Palmerston, who saw it as helping Britain by drawing French troops, money and attention away from Europe, while poking at America’s pride. 25
It was from within this cauldron of events, threats and opportunities that Brown rose in the House once again in May 1864 to renew his call for a select committee to investigate constitutional change. The intervening months had chastened Canadian members and this time the resolution quickly passed. Within days, Brown stood in that Quebec City committee room and slid the key into his pocket. Both Macdonalds, Cartier, McGee, Mowat and others were there, and Galt would soon join them. Brown forced them to talk, and talk they did. Eight meetings took place and all the old hatreds, suspicions and hard feelings were put aside. The Civil War and its impending conclusion meant that the colonial leaders could no longer afford to play their old partisan games.
On June 14, the committee reported back to the House. It recommended the creation of a new federal system applied either to a reconfigured Canada East and West or to all British North American provinces. Committee members did not unanimously endorse the recommendation. Of the three who opposed it, the most important was John A. Macdonald, who insisted on a recommendation for a legislative union: one central government with no sub-national provinces.
The committee had done a tremendous service in bringing bipartisan support to the most divisive of issues, but its report was immediately swamped by the very inanities it was designed to address. Later that same day, the government fell—again.
Brown was infuriated, but like Grant, he refused to yield and instead pushed forward. He arranged a meeting with his old rival John A. Macdonald. The two had been political opponents for years, and their professional rivalry had grown to become a personal, visceral hatred. But Brown put those feelings aside and invited Galt and Macdonald for a chat in his room at the St. Louis Hotel.
The next day, Macdonald rose in the House. Everyone expected an announcement of dissolution and yet another election, the fourth in two years. Instead, he elicited gasps from both sides when he stated that a coalition had been formed and that Brown would be joining his government with the goal of bringing about constitutional change from the midst of crisis. Joseph Dufresne, a member from Canada East who had all but given up on Canada, rushed across the floor and hugged Brown around the neck, hanging there ludicrously before dropping to the floor and then jumping up to vigorously pump his hand.
Brown had taken the biggest political gamble of his life for the good of his country. Even the Toronto Leader, which seldom missed an opportunity to slam Brown, reported, “Events which occurred today may be pregnant with results of vastly greater importance than perhaps ever befell Canada.”26 The paper was right.
FORGING AN UN-AMERICAN VISION
The American Revolution and the country it created were the world’s first and most successful expressions of the broad sweep of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played essential roles in translating those thoughts to the events, needs and documents of their time, thereby providing America’s ideological foundation. The civic humanist and republican ideas of the Enlightenment were sound, and the political structure constructed to reflect them was brilliant.
In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln referred to those ideas in the brief address in which he dedicated the Gettysburg cemetery to the thousands of young men who had given their lives in the epic battle four months earlier. Among those who travelled with the president from Washington to Pennsylvania was Canadian Reform party member of the legislature William McDougall. McDougall listened as Lincoln’s two-minute address broadened the war’s goal from preserving the union to reinventing America, as a signal to the world that a people could indeed organize themselves according to the core Enlightenment concepts of freedom and equality. As Lincoln memorably declared, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”27
McDougall understood Lincoln’s point but, like his compatriots who would join him in Charlottetown and Quebec seven months later to create their own nation, he did not agree. While freedom and equality are noble concepts and certainly worthy of forming a society’s foundation, the Civil War was proving to Canadian leaders that the United States was far from an inspirational beacon to the world. The fact that the country dedicated to freedom and equality had for three hundred years enslaved millions of its people, and was at that moment arming its citizens to butcher each other over the promise of its creed and its concept of federal power-sharing, was sufficient evidence that the American experiment had failed. Even the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation was belied by blood, Northern desertions and the race riots that followed its announcement. While McDougall and other Canadians disagreed about many things, on one fundamental point there was no dispute—America at war with itself offered only a negative example of political concepts that Canada must reject, and structural mistakes that it must avoid.28
Brown, Macdonald, Galt, Mowat, McGee, Cartier, McDougall and the others charged with the awesome responsibility of creating that country were practical men not poets, and practising politicians not angels. They were also working in the shadow of a clock and a crisis. Consequently, rather than seeking to persuasively express the philosophical basis for their actions, as the American colonists had done when they entrusted Jefferson and others to draft a declaration of independence, they acted according to their experience and the already fully formed utilitarian ideas that they brought to the table. Those ideas were complex and reflected their late nineteenth-century mindset rather than the eighteenth-century ideological values of their American counterparts.
Most important among the concepts that informed their deliberations were those of Edmund Burke, an Irish nationalist and British member of parliament. In 1790, he had written the influential Reflections on the Revolution in France, an uncompromising critique of the revolution, its leaders and its ideas. He argued that governments should not be based upon abstract theory that might be temporarily popular with mobs on the street, but rather upon long-tested and respected tradition. He warned about the dangers inherent in political leaders’ becoming “entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry.” 29 Circumstances, rather than a blind adherence to some set of ideological principles, should dictate practical solutions. Brown, Macdonald and the others, quite appropriately, did not mention Burke’s anti-ideology ideology, but it was present throughout their deliberations and it informed their decisions.30 When later explaining the political structure they had designed, for instance, Macdonald conjured Burkean ideas to defend it: “I am satisfied to confine myself to practical things—to the securing of such practical measures as the country really wants. I am satisfied not to have a reputation for indulging in imaginary schemes and harbour ideas that may end sometimes in an annexation movement, sometimes in Federalism, and sometimes in a legislative union, but always utopian and never practical.”31
Important among the practical measures to which Macdonald referred was the anti-Enlightenment and un-American notion that power must not be split among government branches or rest with the executive; it must rest, rather, with Parliament: “A great evil in the United States is that the President is a despot for four years.… Under the British Constitution, with the people having always the power in their own hands and with the responsibility of a Ministry to Parliament, we are free from such despotism.”32
Linked to the Canadian founders’ belief in the primacy of Parliament was their agreement tha
t members of parliament needed to be more than simply delegates sent to echo the views of constituents. They should be educated, thoughtful leaders, unencumbered by whims of the un- or ill-informed electorate.33 This common understanding again reflected Burke, who, in a speech to the people of his Bristol constituency, had bluntly stated that he would all but ignore them, as he believed that members of parliament needed to act not according to the desires of their constituents but according to their considered opinion. 34
Ancillary to the rejection of a presidential system in favour of a parliamentary system rich with independent members was an abhorrence of the American brand of democracy. Canadian and British leaders alike saw American democracy as akin to mob rule, to be avoided at all costs. The Canadians preferred constitutional liberty. Cartier spoke in favour of the notion with an argument for restraint in democracy: the United States “founded [its] federation for the purpose of carrying out democracy on this continent but we felt … convinced that purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations.”35 Cartier and the others were not damning democracy itself but rather the unbridled and often undisciplined, ill-informed power of the majority—the mobs that had wreaked havoc on the streets of Boston and Paris and to whom, it was believed, too many American politicians bowed far too easily, until they had tilted so far forward as to fall into civil war.
Also important were ideas regarding minority rights. At the outset of talks among Canadian political leaders in that summer of 1864, Macdonald’s was the voice most strongly advocating a legislative union in which one parliament would rule without the divided powers of sub-national governments. He was quickly swayed, however, by the realization that the project was doomed from the start unless the rights of the French Catholic minority were protected, and that the best guarantor of those rights was a two-tier federal system. Cartier was essential in making this point. He wanted to ensure that Canada East would have its unique language, religion, education and system of law protected in a new federal structure. He convinced Macdonald and the others that only through the establishment of legitimate sub-national governments, with sufficient power to protect those rights, would French Canadians support the creation of a new country—the state must protect the nation. However, he said that if the structure was sound, and through it French rights secure, then French Canadians would be among the new country’s most loyal citizens.36
Despite their agreement on the need for provincial governments, Brown and the others were unanimous in their desire to locate overwhelming constitutional power in the parliament of a central government. The United States had been built on the assumption that the states existed first as independent entities, and that they created the central government by surrendering only tiny slivers of their sovereignty. Brown, Macdonald and the others on their committee saw the concept of states’ rights as the fundamental flaw in the American system which had caused the Civil War. As Macdonald argued, “The various States of the adjoining Republic had always acted as separate sovereignties.… The primary error at the formation of their constitution was that each state reserved to itself all sovereign rights, save the small portion delegated. We must reverse this process by strengthening the General Government and conferring on the Provincial bodies only such powers as may be required for local purposes. All sectional prejudices and interests can be legislated for by the local legislatures.”37 In response to James Chandler, a member of Nova Scotia’s legislature who worried about locating too much power at the centre, Macdonald said: “We should concentrate the power in the Federal Government, and not adopt the decentralization of the United States. Mr. Chandler would give sovereign power to the Local Legislatures, just where the United States failed.… Mr. [Alexander] Stephens, the present [Confederate]Vice President, was a strong Union man, yet when the time came, he went to his state.”38
The essence of the committee’s thinking was that a new Canadian parliament would be afforded all the power it needed to tend to the interests of the country as a whole, while checking the power of the provincial governments by listing important national concerns as federal powers. Second, a reserve clause would note that any power not specifically allocated to the provincial governments would be held by the central parliament. If this were not enough, the central parliament would also have the power to disallow any laws passed by a provincial government that were deemed to contradict the welfare of the country. The federal government alone would speak for Canada.
Brown and his colleagues emphasized that the creation of this new federal state would not sever links with Britain. To the contrary, there was unanimity in the desire to maintain the trans-Atlantic ties that the Americans had so violently cut in the Revolutionary War. After all, beyond economic and military necessity, there existed a spiritual link to Britain. Macdonald later exclaimed as a campaign slogan, “A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.” His phrase was effective because it reflected the collective consensus. Even George Cartier took pride in being a British citizen, wore clothes tailored in London and named one of his daughters Reine-Victoria. He saw the maintenance of British ties as essential to ensuring the survival of French Canada, for its cultural uniqueness would certainly decline if it was allowed to be placed in the American melting pot. Cartier said of his proud French, and Catholic, nation, “If they had their institutions, their language, and their religion intact today, it was precisely because of their adherence to the British Crown.”39 Indeed, Canadians and Maritimers were sentimental enough to love all things British, while practical enough to know that if the British ties were cut, their days of independence from the United States would be numbered.
CONFEDERATION CONFERENCES
The stately Queen Victoria steamed into Charlottetown’s beautiful harbour on September 1, 1864. The picturesque Prince Edward Island town was home to seven thousand people and the well-kept Georgian homes of its capital city stretched along streets rising from the tranquil bay. As Brown wrote to Anne, “It is as pretty a country as you ever put your eye upon.”40 Eight Canadian delegates, including Brown, McDougall, Cartier, Galt, McGee and Macdonald, changed into fine clothes in preparation for the expected grand welcome. It did not come. Few had noticed their arrival, as most of Charlottetown was preoccupied by the Slaymaker and Nichols Olympic Circus. The Canadians watched, bemused, as the province’s provincial secretary, W.H. Pope, rowed himself to the ship in a little dory and did his best to greet them warmly.
The Island’s lieutenant-governor, George Dundas, hosted a reception at Government House that evening. It was the first of the many social gatherings during which the delegates from various provinces grew to know, like and trust each other. While Brown had been essential in getting them all to Charlottetown, in that first reception John A. Macdonald proved himself Confederation’s indispensable man.
Macdonald had been late in warming to the idea of Confederation. He had always seemed fixated on immediate, practical, partisan and political matters. In Charlottetown, however, his inestimable skill with people and his ability to forge unlikely coalitions became the movement’s single most important asset, a fact not lost on him when, beside his signature in a Charlottetown guest book, he listed his occupation as “cabinet maker.” He charmed the Maritime delegates; he charmed their wives. He talked more, smiled more, drank more and persuaded more about more than anyone there.
The Canadians had arrived well prepared. Cartier, Macdonald and Galt began with three days of presentations outlining the legal, political and military reasons for Confederation, their dreams for a country that would someday stretch to the Arctic and Pacific oceans, and then intricacies of the financial details. Brown spoke the next day for over four hours about the proposed constitutional structure. Having heard the Canadians, the Maritime delegates met and dropped their pretense of a narrow Maritime union—they were in. The conference moved to Saint John and eventually, with more meetings, to Halifax. Promises were made to resume the talks in Quebec City
in October.
At the final dinner before the recess, hosted by Nova Scotia’s Charles Tupper at the Halifax Hotel, Macdonald rose to present a toast. He thanked his hosts, and spoke admiringly of all that had been accomplished. He spoke of the delegates proudly drawing upon Britain’s long tradition of parliamentary democracy. Macdonald praised the American Constitution for its bold uniqueness but also noted the flaws in the American system that the Civil War had laid bare. “It is for us,” he said, “to take advantage by experience, and endeavour to see if we cannot arrive by careful study at such a plan as will avoid the mistakes of our neighbours.… If we can only attain that object—a vigorous general government—we shall not be New Brunswickers, nor Nova Scotians, nor Canadians, but British Americans, under the sway of the British sovereign.”41 He went on to argue that a larger, stronger union could better defend itself against aggressive American intentions, and he equated the proposed new Canada to the Confederacy: “The gallant defence that is being made by the Southern Republic—at this moment they have not much more than four millions of men—not much exceeding our own numbers—yet what a brave fight they have made.”42
The conference resumed on October 10 in Quebec City. Once again, each delegation demonstrated its commitment to parliamentary democracy by including government and opposition among their members. This time even Newfoundland sent two delegates. They met in a grey stone building with tall arched windows through which delegates could marvel at the beauty of the St. Lawrence River, churning far below the towering bluff. Quebec’s old stone buildings and the cobbled streets of lower town charmed, but skies that had been so clear in the Maritimes offered only dark days and endless rain. There would be fewer walks and buggy rides, but just as many grand balls and multi-course dinners. The champagne flowed as freely as the rain. Canadian premier Sir Etienne-Paschal Taché was the chair, but Macdonald again ran the show.