by Conrad Black
MacNab was beset by creditors, having lived at the outer edge of his means, and was also intermittently gouty, but he went into defensive mode, recalibrated his guns, and soldiered on under new rules of engagement yet again. He was scandalized by the Rebellion Losses Bill, and he gasconaded as a hero of the burning down of Parliament, having carried out the portrait of Her Britannic Majesty as flames licked at it, but he was careful to avoid the annexation petition. He hastened back to London waving the union flag, but was rebuffed, largely by Hincks’s victory in the exchange of editorial opinions with Gladstone. MacNab, needing a new repertoire, returned defeated but unbowed. He eased out Sherwood as leader of the Tories in 1850, spoke always with moderation of the French, kept the High Church, imperialist lackeys at arm’s-length, and criticized the Great Ministry only on sensible grounds. It was a compelling performance that did not come naturally to him, and he carried it into the leadership of the opposition against Hincks. He engaged in frequent constructive discussion with Morin’s entourage, and when Hincks was suddenly vulnerable to charges of impropriety (stopping well short of behaviour of which MacNab was in fact guilty), in an unusually clear illustration of the fluidity of political fortunes, the music stopped and MacNab’s turn had come.
Allan MacNab suddenly had a brief shining moment at the forefront of reform; his government enacted its (and Hincks’s) program: the militia was restructured, an issue where MacNab himself was knowledgeable; the Clergy Reserves were finally secularized and this perennial issue was drained of its venom; the seigneurial system, which had become an absurd anomaly exploited by sharpers rather than being, as it was intended, the cradle of a legitimate and conscientious and deserving French-Canadian nobility, was abolished; and the Legislative Council became elective. These were the swift and important attainments of the government headed by the most energetic and visible enemy of the 1837 rebels, in league with Morin, the chief author of the Ninety-Two Resolutions and the chief henchman of the great Patriote Louis-Joseph Papineau. Canada’s genius for compromise and adaptation while retaining what it needed to survive and grow and define itself advanced another notch. Allan MacNab had a brilliant moment as dean of the vanguard of reform; Baldwin and LaFontaine must have watched in gape-mouthed disbelief.
For Allan MacNab, fortune fled suddenly and on winged feet, as often happens to people who have kept their world’s attention as a juggler for too long. He was the subject of new rumours of self-directed financial largesse. He was taking money from the Great Western Railway as a payoff to withdraw while negotiating with the Grand Trunk he had so long opposed, and was premier of the province all the time though rarely present in the Assembly because of his advancing gout (the habit of two bottles of port at a sitting would not have helped that condition). For Allan MacNab, it all gradually slipped away. MacNab retired as premier and sailed for England in 1856. (Elgin, having successfully completed his work, departed to take up his new post as high commissioner to China, then in the midst of the Opium Wars. He had been one of the most effective and well-regarded governors any part of the Canadas had seen, and remains so.) Allan MacNab returned to Canada to retire from the Assembly in 1857, re-embarked to Britain and unsuccessfully sought election in Brighton to the British House of Commons in 1859, came back to Canada and was elected to the Legislative Council he had made an elective body in 1860, and was elected the Speaker of that House in 1862. He was adroitly trying to balance his accounts to the end. He died at his imposing Dundurn Castle on August 8, 1862, aged sixty-four, leaving an estate of no value but able to acquit its debts, his conversion to Roman Catholicism assuring him of controversy to the end and beyond.
“Inept at planning and organization but a promoter and enthusiast in many commercial, military, and political schemes, MacNab cultivated an image at the expense of substance.… But because he was not completely of the feudal world or a member of its ruling class, or completely of the world of steam and entrepreneurial activities, he was able to serve as an unsteady link between both.”62 Withal, he was a patriotic Canadian, a brave soldier, an important figure in the suppression of the rebellion, an influential guide of the old Tories to the harbour of Baldwinian reform, and, at the last, the agent of profound and benign change that had long been sought by crusaders more zealous and virtuous and consistent than himself.
The long, tumultuous, brilliant, and seminal hour of John Alexander Macdonald had come, not by chance but by his own enlightened merit, augmented by his talent for almost artistic chicanery. Macdonald had been born in Scotland in 1815, came to Canada at age five with his family, who settled in Kingston, and became a lawyer and was elected an alderman in 1843, and a member of the Assembly as a Conservative in 1844. Macdonald remained a member of Parliament for fourteen consecutive terms, forty-seven years, until he died. He was made receiver general and a cabinet member by Sweet William Draper in 1847, but the government was defeated in 1848. Brown’s Globe editorialized, on Macdonald’s elevation, that he was “a harmless man … a third class lawyer,” but the more perceptive Lord Elgin, showing the new minister unusual as well as insightful attention, wrote his boss, Grey: “The prospects of the administration are brighter – a certain Mr. Macdonald, a person of consideration among the moderate Conservative, anti-Compact party has consented to accept the office of Receiver General.”63 He was back again in 1854 as organizer of the Liberal-Conservative coalition headed by MacNab and Morin, in which government Macdonald served as attorney general and was the real strength of the regime as MacNab, gouty and irascible, scrambled to salvage his fortune in preference to his public office. As MacNab ceased to be presentable as leader of the government, and three Reform ministers retired, Macdonald waited patiently a little longer and then also resigned with his Conservative colleague in the government, and then orchestrated MacNab’s departure in 1856, becoming the strong man of the new government, but with Étienne-Paschal Taché as premier and Macdonald as attorney general and co-leader. Macdonald was absent in Britain promoting government projects there, and returned in the autumn to find himself leading the post-MacNab Conservatives in a coalition in which his co-leader, Taché, had retired and been replaced by George-Étienne Cartier. The government was narrowly re-elected on the heels of a landslide in Canada East, but Macdonald defeated his opponent in Kingston, John Shaw, by the almost totalitarian margin of 1,189 to 9, and Shaw was burned in effigy.
The Assembly had voted in 1856 to move the government permanently to Quebec, but in 1857 Macdonald persuaded the Assembly to reconsider and to ask Queen Victoria to choose the site of the permanent capital of the united Province of Canada, which had been bouncing around since the inhospitable English Montrealers had torched the Parliament in Montreal to the ground in 1849. Macdonald privately asked the Colonial Office to invite Her Britannic Majesty to defer her decision for ten months, until after the election, but in February 1858 she revealed her selection of the small but conveniently located Bytown, on the Ottawa River, and in gratitude for this distinction the slightly remote lumbering town, named after Colonel John By, renamed itself Ottawa. On July 28, 1858, an opposition Canada East member proposed a motion declaring Bytown an unsuitable place and asking the queen to reconsider her decision. A number of Macdonald’s caucus supported the motion, the government was defeated, and Macdonald resigned. Elgin’s successor as governor general, Sir Edmund Walker Head, invited George Brown to try to form a government. The law of the time required incoming ministers to resign their seats in Parliament and seek confirmation by the electors of their status as ministers. Those who had held office in the previous thirty days could return to those offices without an election. Pending the by-elections for Brown and his ministers-designate, Macdonald held a majority in the Assembly, and he defeated the government. Head declined Brown’s request for a dissolution and Macdonald resumed office with a majority, as fewer than thirty days had passed since his government’s defeat on the Bytown vote. Macdonald’s ministry was restored, its majority intact, and what became known as t
he “double shuffle” entered into the lore of the country. Head insisted that the flim-flam be alleviated somewhat by making Cartier the premier and Macdonald the deputy. This was acceptable, but Macdonald ran the government, as everyone, including Cartier, a capable businessman but not remotely as adept a political operator as his chief, knew.
Macdonald was a man whose political aptitudes developed more quickly than his policy positions. He was never anti-American, but seems from his earliest political days to have considered the nature of American government unstable and prone to corruption, oppression, demagogy, and righteous outbursts of national aggression. And he was always wary of the American ambition to subsume Canada. He regarded slavery as inhuman barbarity overlaid by hypocrisy (a reasonable view, after all) and considered constitutional monarchy a superior system to republicanism, of which the United States was the only durable example in a serious country until the French Third Republic, unlike its predecessors, put down roots after 1871. A Scot, though not a notably religious man, Macdonald favoured an official treatment for the Church of Scotland as established as the Church of England, but he knew that the position of the Roman Catholics made such consideration of established Protestant churches impractical. Macdonald was a fair-minded man, without religious or racial prejudice, in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. He feared American annexationism and considered the Reformers too prone to speak loosely of annexation whenever they were unable to sweep the country. (His political suspicions of the United States did not inhibit his respect for it as a fellow democracy and his admiration for many American contemporaries.) These suspicions conformed to his preference for constitutional monarchy where the sovereign was prominent enough to prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of officials without exercising much power personally, which seemed to him a better system of checks and balances than the American system, where one man was chief of state, head of government, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and likely to control the Congress sufficiently to immunize himself against the judiciary (as was the case with Jackson in particular).
From Macdonald’s wariness of America came his genius for staying close enough with Great Britain to deter American hegemonists, and he developed to a fine art the necessary steering of a path between the two powers, enjoying American meritocratic prosperity and liberty and optimism with British forms of government. He was rarely overly impressed with the aptitudes of the British to judge Canadian events and political personalities, or to negotiate with the Americans, who he thought usually swindled the British. But pro forma deference to the shared Mother Country was a small price to pay for the deterrent power of being under the umbrella of the British Empire opposite the Americans. Macdonald early developed the idea that Canada could develop a distinctive and even superior form of government, but knew that it depended on the pillars of taking the best of American positivism and British political moderation; the subtle and not overly cynical invocation of the two countries against each other for properly Canadian ends while being faithful and inoffensive to both; and frank and full collaboration with the French Canadians. These views developed in tandem with the acquisition of the political skills and arts necessary to shape events. His ability to achieve and hold power progressed at about the same speed as his notion of what to do with political power in the general good, of course, through the agency of his own fiercely defended incumbency. Even in the era of Lincoln, Bismarck, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and such figures of lesser great powers as Cavour and Andrássy, John Macdonald was a noteworthy statesman who would leave a durable and entirely positive influence in the world.
6. Toward a United Canada, 1858–1862
In the United States, the long agony of slavery was now perilously approaching its climax. The supreme effort to resolve the issue had been made in the Compromise of 1850, led by three of the greatest figures in the history of the United States Senate, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas. It finished the tortuous process of assimilating the winnings of the Mexican–American War to early statehood, and abolished the slave trade in Washington, D.C. But it left two ticking time bombs: squatter sovereignty by which territories, as they became eligible for statehood, would determine by referendum whether they wished to be admitted as free or slave states; and a harsh tightening of the fugitive slave laws that grossly discriminated against anyone accused of being a fugitive slave in a free state, over-rewarding bounty hunters and denying the alleged fugitive any practical right of self-defence. It disgusted all moderate opinion in the North and incited the South to believe that slavery could spread to northern states (where there was no economic rationale for the importation of slaves, as they were not more productive agricultural workers in cooler climates than whites were). This assured that there would be miniature civil wars in each territory in the run-up to the determination of whether it would seek admission as a free or slave state. This is exactly what happened in Kansas in 1854, where there were competing vote totals and a great deal of violence between the two armed camps. There were terrible scenes in the attempted rounding up of fugitive slaves, and in 1857 the Supreme Court determined in the Dred Scott decision that the Missouri Compromise boundary for the admissibility of slavery of 36.30 (the Missouri–Arkansas border), was an unconstitutional confinement of slavery and that even fugitive slaves who were apparently free by operation of the law were not free and had no rights unless they were specifically emancipated by their owners. The old Whig Party had disintegrated and a new party, the Republicans, had been founded by the Whig leaders in the major states and held to the platform that slavery could not spread beyond its existing borders. The South let it be known that it would consider the election of a Republican as president to be cause for secession, and the principal Republican leaders, including the senator and former governor of New York William Henry Seward, and the talented Illinois lawyer and former congressman Abraham Lincoln, who ran against Douglas for the Senate in 1858, made it clear that any attempt to secede would be resisted by force. The great American Union was sleepwalking toward the precipice.
Canada had had an excellent record of receiving fugitive slaves. Approximately forty thousand fugitive slaves made their away along the Underground Railroad to Canada, where they were generally provided for generously and were free to move about without any segregation or restriction, though most lived in Black communities that were assisted by anti-slavery organizations in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. The leading American anti-slavery advocates Harriet Tubman and John Brown lived in Canada at times. Tubman, one of the great heroines of American history, regarded herself as a Canadian and resided in St. Catharines, near the Niagara River, in the late 1850s. John Brown attempted to recruit white volunteers in Canada for his plan to seize the armoury at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, an action that was suppressed by General Robert E. Lee, then of the Union Army, and for which Brown was hanged, though no one had been killed. There were at least eleven black Canadian doctors who were fugitive slaves or sons of fugitive slaves who served in the Union Army in the Civil War, and the white Canadian doctor Alexander Ross, an anti-slavery activist who had many fugitive slaves as patients, at the request of President Lincoln himself, assisted in breaking up a Confederate spy ring in Montreal. Josiah Henson, the model for Uncle Tom, the chief character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold an unheard-of total of more than two million copies in the first decade after its publication in 1852, lived in Canada for many years.
An escaped slave, Joseph Taper, settled near St. Catharines in 1839 and wrote this letter back to his former and still putative owner:
I now take this opportunity to inform you that I am in a land of liberty, in good health.… Since I have been in the Queens dominions, I have been well-contented … man is as God intended he should be. That is, all are born free and equal … not like the Southern laws which puts man made in the image of God, on level with brutes.…
We have good scho
ols, and all the colored population [are] supplied with schools. My boy Edward who will be six years next January, is now reading, and I intend keeping him at school until he becomes a good scholar.…
My wife and self are sitting by a good comfortable fire happy, knowing that there are none to molest [us] or make [us] afraid. God save Queen Victoria.64
The high point of the Cartier–Macdonald government of 1858 to 1862 was the visit to Canada of Prince Albert Edward in 1860, more than forty years later King Edward VII. He came in place of his mother, to whom the invitation was originally directed. Queen Victoria did not like sea travel. The Prince arrived at Gaspé on August 12, 1860, was met by Governor General Edmund Walker Head and George-Étienne Cartier and a welcoming delegation, and proceeded up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. This was the first visit to the New World by an heir to the throne of Britain, and was conceived and choreographed by the prince consort, Albert, who was often very innovative. Edward was accompanied by the Duke of Newcastle, the colonial secretary and a crony of Gladstone’s tainted by scandal because of the adultery and divorce of his wife and the recent elopement of his daughter with the mad and alcoholic son of the Marquess of Londonderry, who was soon committed for drunkenly assaulting her and died violently in an insane asylum. In the complicated British manner, Newcastle’s daughter was eventually one of the future Edward VII’s many mistresses, and she ultimately died prematurely of syphilis. The royal tour began in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where, according to the New York Herald, the prince appeared to “have a very susceptible nature and has already [while dancing with the young ladies of Newfoundland] yielded to several twinges in the region of his midriff.”65