Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

* Richard Rush (1780–1859), the minister to Great Britain, former attorney general, and future candidate for vice president and secretary of the treasury, was an extremely capable public official, as was his analogue, Sir Charles Bagot (1781–1843), husband of the Duke of Wellington’s niece, minister to Washington, and future ambassador to Russia and to the Netherlands, and he will re-enter this narrative as governor general of Canada.

  * Readers should note Mackenzie’s character to contrast it with that of his grandson and namesake, W.L. Mackenzie King, not born for another fifty years, who would exercise an immense influence in Canada in the subsequent century. King was almost supernaturally cautious.

  * The last Bourbon, Charles X, decreed the death penalty for profaning the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church and a draconian law of restitution for property seized and other grievances arising from the previous forty years of tumult, completing the emollient trifecta with the imposition of severe censorship. The rather timid legislative houses rebelled, bringing the various Paris militia and constabulary units with them and pulling the masses of the riot-prone and tested Parisians out in huge numbers, whereupon Charles decamped from Saint-Cloud to Britain and the curtain came down with an indifferent thud on a quarter-millennium of Bourbon rule.

  CHAPTER 3

  Baldwin, LaFontaine, and the Difficult Quest for Autonomy from Britain While Retaining British Protection from the United States, 1830–1867

  1. Crisis, Rebellion, and Reaction, 1830–1839

  The Canadas and Atlantic colonies had come through the wars well, and were the subject of modest imperial optimism. But there was no consensus about their political future locally or in London and minimal contact between the units of British North America. They presented almost a blank political canvas and complete uncertainty about the policies and personalities to steer the way forward. Beyond a general desire for a more autonomous status of their public administration, the inhabitants persevered like milling sheep, seeking everything: more independence but continued military solidarity from the British, and liberty and prosperity equivalent to that of the Americans but without political absorption. Every consensus was fragmentary and all political leadership was factional.

  These communities were still evolving from the simple organizations and mores of the pioneers, which provided plenty of food and fuel but generated little export income. “In such a society, it was the poor man’s homespun virtues that met with approval. Things were simple and ostentation frowned upon. Everybody was religious.” (Meaning either Catholic or Protestant, as almost everyone was one or the other.) “Wit and Wisdom were close to the soil.… In contrast with the United States, there was little imaginative conception of the future. But … men were striking their roots into deep soil and slow growth makes the hardest wood.”1

  While less complicated than Lower Canada because of its smaller scale, shorter history, and the absence of the ethnic frictions and the legacy of conquest, Upper Canada was a turbulent cauldron also. In the 1830 elections in Upper Canada, the Reformers were routed. William Lyon Mackenzie and Barnabas Bidwell held their districts, but many of their colleagues were defeated. The victory of the royalist conservatives in the 1830 election in Upper Canada left the ministry in the incapable and reactionary hands of Attorney General Henry Boulton and the solicitor general, Christopher Hagerman. The government was prepared to concede control of the purse to the Legislature and wanted only a minor concession to British usage, but Mackenzie worked this up to a usurpation of immense proportions, and he abused his parliamentary immunity from allegations of defamation with a torrent of the most sulphurous libels and slanders in the Colonial Advocate and in the Assembly. He fell, in Stephen Leacock’s words, to “irresponsible vanity.”2 In this contest of extremists, Mackenzie, though his tactical judgment was no better than that of his opponents, was closer to the right and the future, and he was, in his slightly demented fashion, an authentic popular spokesman, as Louis-Joseph Papineau was among the French, though more eloquently, and with greater moderation (though moderation was not Papineau’s strong suit either). The government picked a quarrel by accusing Mackenzie of a breach of privilege by publishing the journal of debates without appendices, an absurd complaint that failed, as did the subsequent claim of publishing libels. Mackenzie replied with a frenzied onslaught in the Colonial Advocate that included the denunciation of the Assembly as a “sycophantic office for registering the decrees of a mean and mercenary executive.” The Assembly responded with the charge against Mackenzie of “gross, scandalous, and malicious libels,” and it expelled him, describing him (with zoological confusion) as a “dog” and a “reptile,” on December 12, 1830. In the resulting by-election, Mackenzie ran as a popular hero and martyr. The governing party did not present a candidate, and the Reform leader won a landslide and brushed aside efforts to prevent him taking his seat. His newspaper office was attacked again, and he was roughed up at a political meeting in Hamilton. Mackenzie determined to emulate Papineau, and in May 1832 embarked for England bearing petitions from supporters in the cause of what was known as responsible government (wherein the ministry was answerable to the democratically elected House). He was met by a blizzard of counter-protests, but the political tide in Britain was running in his favour, and although his own written submissions were not especially well-crafted, Mackenzie did have a successful interview with William Huskisson’s replacement at the Colonial Office, Lord Goderich (who had had a brief tour as prime minister between Canning, who followed Liverpool, and Wellington). Goderich sent the Upper Canada government a message asserting that he would not be informing himself entirely on the basis of their account of these events. This was seen by the authorities in York (Toronto) as “an elegant piece of fiddle faddle.”3

  A really monstrous farce ensued, as Mackenzie was denied the right to sit by Boulton and Hagerman’s outrageous conception that Mackenzie had forfeited that right, having twice been expelled, a finding for which there was no support in law or in fact. Mackenzie again won a by-election, unopposed, and was again denied his right to sit, and the new colonial secretary, Lord Stanley, sacked Boulton and Hagerman, though Hagerman pleaded so intensely to Stanley, he was allowed to remain. (Boulton was sent to Newfoundland and was so shaken by the rough-and-tumble of that unruly province that he returned to Upper Canada a convert to the virtues of responsible government.) Mackenzie was again expelled on an old claim of libel, and on the advice of the lieutenant-governor, Sir John Colborne, he went to the clerk of the Executive Council, who administered the oath, but even after all this, and having been sponsored by the governor and sworn under his auspices, the Assembly would not allow him to sit and ordered his arrest by the sergeant-at-arms. He was released after a very ferocious debate but was still denied his seat. Mackenzie was elected the first mayor of Toronto, as York was now renamed. New elections for the Legislative Assembly were held in October 1834, and Mackenzie did win, both personally and as head of the Reform movement. But he would have done better, and brought a stronger group of candidates in with him, if he had not published an inflammatory letter from his friend the English radical Joseph Hume. Mackenzie had himself appointed chairman of a select committee to inquire into the many neuralgic grievances of Mackenzie himself and his followers. The “Seventh Report on Grievances” was sent to the new colonial secretary (the job was a hot potato), Lord Glenelg, in the first government of liberal Tory Sir Robert Peel. The “Seventh Report” vented the now traditional concerns of Mackenzie and his cohort: patronage abuses, official compensation, the war between the churches, land grants, pensions, public accounts, and the long-drawn-out struggle over jurisdiction in revenue collection and spending.

  It was at this time that Colborne inexplicably chose to carve fifty-seven Anglican rectories out of the Clergy Reserves and make this very large donation to the church striving to be recognized as established. Although Colborne had the right to do this, it was an insanely mistimed venture, and Colborne was abruptly sacked as lieutenant-g
overnor of Upper Canada. Colborne (1778–1863) was another old soldier and bearer of an astonishingly varied career. He was a hero of the Battle of Corunna (1809), where Napoleon drove the British out of Spain and into the sea, and served with distinction in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, where he led the attack that broke the Imperial Guard, the only time in history that such an event occurred. He was lieutenant-governor of Guernsey from 1821 to 1828, and of Upper Canada from 1828 to 1836. His promotion of public works and immigration schemes produced a 50 per cent increase in the province’s population during his term, but his preferential treatment of recent British immigrants and his diversion of public lands to the Church of England and his favourites in the Family Compact not only led to his recall but seriously compromised the loyalty to the Crown of more people than should have been susceptible to Mackenzie’s ravings. On his recall as governor, he was confirmed as commander of the armed forces in the Canadas, in which role, and briefly as governor general, he would play an important part in the events to come. He became a peer, a field marshal, and rounded out his remarkable career as lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands from 1843 to 1849 and commander of the armed forces in Ireland from 1855 to 1860. With a more civilized and subtle opponent than Mackenzie, Colborne’s imperious bigotry would have been even more damaging than it was, and Canada in the 1830s was not the place for a governor who, like Sir James Craig thirty years before, had spent all his adult life at war, generally with the kinsmen of the French Canadians. He is best remembered in Canada now as the founder of Upper Canada College, a well-known private school in Toronto modelled on Elizabeth College in Guernsey.* Showing again how erratic British colonial management could be, Colborne was replaced by the catastrophically ill-suited Sir Francis Bond Head.

  In Lower Canada, the government offered the olive branch of surrendering its control of customs duties in 1831, but Papineau and his followers refused a permanent civil list and demanded the abolition of the appointed upper house. In the Montreal municipal elections of 1832, demonstrations and riots became so robust that three people were killed by the military garrison in the restoration of order, and Papineau and his followers in the press called the governor, Lord Aylmer, a murderer in consequence (though he did not leave Quebec during the disturbances). There would be times in the next few years when Papineau and his closest comrades seemed to be torn between a fear of being executed for treason and a desire to achieve that fate. In fact, British despotism was not so severe or inflexible as to justify going to such extremes, and most of the aggrieved acted accordingly, but many were tempted by the allure of mounting the scaffold before a large and sullenly sympathetic crowd and being dispatched by the executioner for the cause.

  Stanley, the War and Colonial secretary, in 1833 (1799–1969, better known as the 14th Earl of Derby, three times prime minister, and, with Disraeli, the leader of the Conservatives between Peel and Salisbury, from 1846 to 1881), hinted darkly that it might be necessary to curtail the rights of some colonists, and Papineau, after two years of pyrotechnics, produced with his collaborators the Ninety-Two Resolutions of February 21, 1834. This was a flammable forensic effort even by Papineau’s standards, and he was a much more urbane and artful composer of such farragos than Mackenzie. Papineau attempted to follow the uplifting lead of Jefferson in his Declaration of 1776 and of the authors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France in 1789. The assembler and composer of the Ninety-Two Resolutions was Augustin-Norbert Morin, the province’s ablest political writer. Papineau contributed the more vitriolic passages in this marathon of protest (“One recognizes here and there the lion’s claws”4).

  Papineau presented the Ninety-Two Resolutions to the Legislative Assembly on February 28, 1834. They were approved by the Assembly and sent to London. The principal demands were for an elected Legislative Council and an executive responsible to the Assembly, and Assembly control of money bills, both in the collection and application of revenue. This could have been formulated in tolerably grandiloquent terms and effectively conformed to what progressive elements in Great Britain were seeking, and the new king (since 1830), William IV, was not particularly hostile. The petitioners stated their loyalty to the British Crown but expressed anger and frustration at the failure of most of the governors sent to Canada to confer these rightful benefits of British political citizenship. Unfortunately, just as Papineau wobbled between rebellion and agitation for reform, he could not resist imposing threats and almost seditious utterances upon his naturally more temperate amanuensis, Morin. As Canada had already experienced, it was in these matters in a grey zone between the precedents offered by the British and the Americans. The British were moving too slowly and absent-mindedly not to lose some Imperial support in the Canadas, but English and French Canadians had to immerse themselves in delusion to imagine that they had either the depth of grievance that drove the Americans to revolt or the slightest prospect of emerging from a revolt with a viable sovereign country: either the British would crush them or the Americans would swallow them whole, or both in succession and by arrangement between the Anglo-Americans, after Washington had calmed the slave states with parallel adventures in Cuba or elsewhere in Latin America. (There would be intermittent agitation in the United States for the balance of the century to seize Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, both before and after the resolution of the slavery crisis.)

  It would unnecessarily tax the patience of readers to recite all the Ninety-Two Resolutions, but these excerpts faithfully convey the flavour of them.

  It was [Aylmer, the governor] who refused to shut down [an epidemic of Asiatic cholera in 1832] by closing the gate of the St. Lawrence; he it was who enticed the sick immigrants into the country, in order to decimate the ranks of the French Canadians.

  This surpassed even Jefferson’s distribe against George III as a bloodstained tyrant and his blood libel on the American Indian. Papineau and Morin (the young and promising Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine had a small hand in it also), continued:

  We are in no wise disposed to admit the excellence of the present Constitution of Canada.… Your Majesty cannot fail to observe that the political world in Europe is at this moment agitated by two great parties, who in different countries appear under the several names of Serviles, Royalists, Tories, and Conservatives, on the one side, and of Liberals, Constitutionalists, Republicans, Whigs, Reformers, Radicals, and similar appellations on the other; that the former is, on the American Continent without any weight or influence except what it derives from its European supporters, and from a trifling number of persons who become their dependents for the sake of personal gain, and of others who from age or habit cling to opinions which are not partaken by any numerous class, while the second party overspreads all America.… Your Majesty’s Secretary of State is mistaken if he believes that the exclusion of a few salaried officers would suffice to make that body harmonize with the wants, wishes, and opinions of the People, as long as the Colonial Governors retain the power of preserving in it a majority of Members rendered servile by their antipathy to every liberal idea.

  It was inexorable:

  In less than twenty years the population of the United States of America will be greater than that of Great Britain, and that of British America will be greater than that of the former English colonies, when the latter deemed that the time was come to decide that the inappreciable advantage of being self-governed, ought to engage them to repudiate a system of Colonial government which was, generally speaking, much better than that of British America now is.

  After renouncing any threat, Papineau concluded this Resolution: “Your Majesty’s faithful Canadian subjects are not sufficiently protected in their lives, their property, and their honour.”

  Even allowing for the florid standards of public documents of the time, and even more among French- than English-speakers, it was little wonder that this interminable, prolix, and pompous torrent of hints and incitements of revolution and miscellaneous insults was ignored by its addresse
e and his secretaries of state. Indeed, it is a credit to the indulgence of the British government, Crown, ministers, and Parliament, that it elicited no acknowledgement at all until Lord Russell dismissed it, rather impetuously, in his own Ten Resolutions three years later. (Russell, then the home secretary, mockingly adopted the formula of resolutions that authorized the Canadian colonial governments to spend money on reasonable ends without any approval of the Legislature. This was unnecessarily provocative, and no colonial initiative should have come from the Home Office, but by this time the British had mismanaged the whole matter out of control, thus finally creating the opportunity for real progress.)

  Papineau’s problem was that he was not only ambivalent about whether he wanted a negotiated and civilized resolution of problems or a violent uprising, although he must have known that the consequences of armed revolt could be hazardous to his physical longevity, either in action or by subsequent prosecution. He further grossly exaggerated the importance of the issues, as Mackenzie did. Of course, it was becoming obsolete and discordant to the times in the English-speaking countries and some others for somewhat broadly elected representatives not to control the finances of the state, at least by oversight, and to require governments to be answerable to them. But it wasn’t an impingement on freedom of speech or legal due process, or relevant to generally rising levels of prosperity, at least in the Canadas. It was a cause that could bring out demonstrators in temperate months in appreciable numbers, but no sane people were really prepared to die for something just to accelerate the timetable of what seemed likely to happen anyway.

  The 1834 elections in Lower Canada were “attended with riots and tumultuous gatherings [and] Revolutionary committees.” (French-Canadian politicians have long been among the world champions in instant recourse to polemical hyperbole.) Votes of supply (funding the government) had failed from 1832 to 1835, and Colborne paid his government’s bills only by borrowing from the war chest. Both of the Canadas were now descending steeply down the slope to civil strife. All they wanted was reform as was occurring in what Canadians could ambitiously call peer jurisdictions, to be granted by a country that was on the verge of a clear victory for liberal reform, and the agitators in the Canadas, in their frustration, had bridged the cultural gap, and the Mackenzie-Papineau factions were in comradely touch with each other, as were some of the less radical and promising members of both political communities.5