Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Cartier was apparently very convivial, even singing French-Canadian songs and performing dances for the future king. The party went on to Montreal by ship, and Edward officially opened the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence, then the longest in the world. The next day, the dignitaries attended an extravagant luncheon at the home of Sir George Simpson on Dorval Island, three miles west of Lachine. Simpson, in effect, as the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the viceroy for forty years of nearly two million square miles, was an admirable host, but it was the end of his career, albeit a fitting one: he died of a stroke a few days later. The prince laid the cornerstone for the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa on September 1 and, calling himself Baron Renfrew, visited the United States as the guest of President Buchanan, who was well-known to the royal family as a former minister to Great Britain. In Parliament, the clever and eloquent MP Thomas D’Arcy McGee called Cartier a “primo boffo,” and Cartier, a spirited partygoer despite his generally austere public aspect, responded that McGee was a “baboon.” Cartier was sometimes fierce in debate as well as loquacious. Joseph Howe called him a “seagull screaming in the wind … [with] a harsh, bad, dictatorial manner.”66 The royal visit was a huge success, although the Orange Lodge was so strong in Kingston (it was banned in Great Britain), it was agreed not to land the prince there, and Macdonald was left to explain this to his constituents.

  Sir Edward Walker Head, the second consecutive clearly successful governor general (though he was something of a crony of Macdonald and Cartier), departed in 1861 (he had enjoyed Canada despite having lost a son by drowning at Shawinigan on the St. Maurice River in 1859), but his association with Canada would continue, as he would become the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1863. He was succeeded as governor general by Charles Viscount Monck, a sensible and equable diplomat, whose task was to urge upon the British North Americans the virtues of federation and of shouldering a greater burden for their own defence.

  Southern states began seceding from the American Union after the election victory of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and Lincoln made it clear that he considered secession to be insurrection, which he was legally empowered to suppress. The American Civil War, or the War Between the States, began in earnest with the Confederate victory at the first Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, on July 21, 1861. Both sides called for a maximum effort, and it was soon clear that the war could be long and sanguinary. Viscount Palmerston had been prime minister of Great Britain for five of the past six years, having previously been foreign secretary for fifteen years and before that the secretary at war for twelve years. He was a very powerful and astute statesman, the ne plus ultra of gunboat diplomacy, who had been one of the creators of the Kingdom of Belgium and of the authors of the resolution of the status of Schleswig and Holstein (between Denmark and Germany, which resolution, he later said, only two people other than him had understood: “One is dead, one is mad, and I’ve forgotten”). He had successfully ended the Crimean War, had no love for America, and, like Russell and Gladstone, would have preferred a Confederate victory to cut America down to size. The comparative outsiders, Disraeli and Prince Albert, warned of the dangers of provoking even a war-wracked America, because however the war ended, British colonies and interests in the Americas would then be indefensible against the Union, and morally Britain could not take up a stance in favour of slaveholding and secession. Palmerston was a feared and forceful man who threatened war on Greece over the status of a single British citizen, Don Pacifico, a Portuguese born in Gibraltar. Palmerston sired an illegitimate child in his seventies (Disraeli said that making this fact public would only increase Palmerston’s majority at the next election), and served as prime minister into his eighties.

  The British were concerned that American belligerency, in this atmosphere, was an increased possibility and they sent fourteen thousand trained soldiers and sizeable grants to mobilize, train, and equip an enlarged Canadian militia. Palmerston’s colonial secretary, the Prince of Wales’s friend Newcastle (only a distant relative of the prime minister of a century before), encountered New York Senator William H. Seward in the autumn of 1860, while accompanying the prince, just after Seward had lost the Republican presidential nomination to Lincoln. Seward would soon become secretary of state, and he told Newcastle that he knew Britain would not dare go to war with the United States. Newcastle replied, “There is no people under Heaven from whom we should endure so much as from yours; to whom we shall make such concessions.… But once touch us in our honour and you will very soon see the bricks of New York and Boston falling about your heads.” This was the reason Canadian leaders endured so much intermittent condescension and obtuseness from the home government: these sentiments were all that kept American hands off Canada for the 130 years from the American Revolution to the First World War.67 Yet Macdonald was able to say “in 1861 that the province was becoming an ally rather than a dependency of Great Britain.”68

  In November 1861, an American warship stopped the British steamer Trent near the Bahamas and removed two Confederate diplomats bound for Britain and France. The British demanded their release, which Lincoln eventually granted, and sent eleven more brigades of soldiers to Canada. John A. Macdonald was created minister of militia affairs and mobilized thirty-eight thousand men, and was gratified that the French Canadians responded with as much enthusiasm as English Canadians. (This supports the traditional French-Canadian argument that they will yield to no one in their determination to defend Canada itself. European and Middle Eastern wars were another matter.) The atmosphere between the Americans, British, and Canadians was fragile. A new verse was added to the American patriotic marching ditty “Yankee Doodle”:

  Secession first he would put down,

  Wholly and forever;

  And afterwards from Britain’s crown,

  He Canada would sever.

  Yet Canadian volunteers for the Union Army were considerable, some as an act of immigration. The total is disputed but may have been as great as forty thousand.69 In these taut circumstances, the British and British North Americans saw the virtues of federation, both on its increasingly clear intrinsic merits and to strengthen Canada against postwar America, whether a sullen hornet of a North shorn of the southern states, or a rampaging Union bull, armed to the teeth and flush with victory.

  Alexander Galt had an extensive interview with President Lincoln on the evening of December 4, 1861. “He is very tall, thin, and of marked features, appears fond of anecdote, of which he has a fund. I liked him for his straight-forward, strong common sense.” Lincoln assured Galt that the press in neither the United States nor in England, “as he had the best reason to know, reflected the real views of either government.” He had accepted the private assurances of Earl Russell to his minister in London (Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of presidents), about outstanding issues, and “had implicit faith in the steady conduct of the American people,” and the current war would not place “successful generals in positions of arbitrary power.… He pledged himself as a man of honour that neither he nor his cabinet entertained the slightest aggressive designs upon Canada, nor had any desire to disturb the rights of Great Britain on this continent.” Galt and the British and Canadians to whom he reported were reassured, and he was much impressed by the president, but not altogether reassured of what might happen as a great war was clearly just beginning with the Confederate rebels. Galt told Lord Lyons, the British minister in Washington, that Lincoln had said that the North would lose the war if it lost Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. (It held all but Viriginia.) Lyons gave Galt a letter for Monck, urging Canadian defence and providing for a special code for an emergency without rousing American suspicions.70

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  There were the usual claims, far from unfounded, of irregularities in the relations between government and the Grand Trunk Railway. Fortunately for Cartier and Macdonald, as the 1862 election approached, George Brown’s deputy as Opposition (Clear Grit) leader, W
illiam McDougall, immolated himself by arguing in Parliament that “Upper Canada is oppressed by a foreign race.” And if the Anglo-Saxon race were not given relief from the injustices of the Union … [and] “there were a bad harvest and consequently great distress, they would have no alternative but to look to Washington.”71 Cartier and Macdonald saw at once the potential advantage to them of this tactical lunacy of casting racist slurs on the French and raising the spectre of annexation for the Loyalist English Canadians; and annexation, at that, to a neighbour in the midst of a terrible civil war. It was one of the great political gaffes in Canadian political history, and in favour of political leaders who knew how to pull out the stops. Macdonald called the election a choice between “constitutional monarchy or the Yankees.” Cartier tried the assimilationist bugbear in Quebec and defeated the rouge radical leader Dorion in the constituency they contested in Montreal, but he lost members of Parliament in French Canada because of the fear that even Macdonald’s Conservatives had assimilationist tendencies and would take advantage of Canada West’s now greater numbers over their French-speaking compatriots. Canada West now had 285,000 more people than Canada East, and the agitation for representation by population, which the French had not sought when they were the majority, was an easy vote-winner among the English. This necessitated blunders like McDougall’s for Macdonald to be able to navigate around it. Macdonald won a solid victory and Brown went down to personal defeat.

  Apart from anything else, Canada certainly had a population, between Halifax and Sarnia, that crossed the threshold for statehood: 3.1 million people, about a third of them French. This compared with 31.4 million in the United States, 29 million in the United Kingdom, 36 million in France, 38 million in Germany, but 3.3 million in the Netherlands, 2.5 million in Switzerland, a little more than 4 million in Portugal and Romania, 3.9 million in Sweden, and only 1.6 million in Denmark and 1.2 million each in Argentina and Australia.72 Canada was ready to take the next giant step in her ineluctable destiny. English-Canadian desire for representation by population and French-Canadian opposition to it were going to make government unmanageable until some new formula was arrived at. The outline, if not the details, of that formula were now, finally, obvious: federation, protecting regional interests and merging what would become national interests, just as the British began to urge that course to make British North America more capable of self-defence.

  From the mid-1840s on, politics in Canada and other advanced countries became intricately mixed up with the progress of the railway industry, and for most of the rest of the nineteenth-century politicians and railway owners and operators had complicated relations, to the point that they were, in some cases, the same people. Along with Viscount Monck, the Duke of Newcastle sent to the Canadas in 1861 one of the most talented railway operators in the world and one of the very greatest and most intelligent active in Canada (where some truly noteworthy railroading personalities are about to appear, to keep Alexander Galt company). Sir Edward William Watkin (1819–1901) was given an informal mandate by Newcastle to clean up the Grand Trunk and also to prepare the way for a transcontinental railway north of the United States, which Newcastle correctly foresaw was all that would keep Canada out of the hands of the Americans whatever the outcome of the American Civil War. Watkin became a partner in his father’s Manchester cotton business in his mid-twenties, founded the Manchester Examiner in 1845, and in the same year became the secretary of the Trent Valley Railway. This line was sold to another, which merged with more lines as the nascent industry steadily consolidated, and in his late twenties Watkin became assistant manager of the resulting London and North Western Railway. He visited the American and Canadian railways when he was in his early thirties and published a book about railway management in 1852 that became a manual for the industry internationally. Unlike most people in his position, his specialty was the construction and management of railways and not just the financing and stock market promotion of them, though he was conversant with that aspect of the industry also. He became the general manager of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway in 1854, held this position until 1862, and was the chairman of that road from 1864 to 1894.

  Watkin cleaned up the Grand Trunk by re-equipping it, suspending interest payments, and moving the headquarters to London. But he fulfilled his remit from Newcastle by advocating the Canadian Pacific Railway. He did this while building the railway from Athens to its port of Piraeus, reorganizing the railways of India, building a railway in the Belgian Congo to serve the mining industry in Katanga, and gradually took over a combination of ten British railways, as well as the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad. At the summit of his career in the 1890s, he was chairman of the South Eastern Railway in England, the Metropolitan Railway, and with his Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire and related lines, which were amalgamated into the Great Central Railway, controlled most of the railways from the south coast of England through London and into the Midlands and to the industrial cities of the North. He was also chairman of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, which owned the railway from Calais to Paris, and he controlled most of the traffic between the British and French capitals. He started, but for political and financial reasons did not proceed with, an English Channel tunnel, and a resort and deepwater port at Dungeness, Kent. Watkin was the last person before 2007 to build a mainline into London, and he was a Liberal member of Parliament from 1857 to 1858, 1864 to 1868, and 1874 to 1895, under Palmerston, Gladstone, and Rosebery. Though other, and very able, men actually founded the Canadian Pacific Railway, Watkin’s role in starting the serious consideration of the transcontinental railway was seminal.

  7. Toward Confederation, 1862–1864

  The virtue of Confederation was that it not only made a stronger entity opposite both the Americans and the British (practically the only nationalities that were of any concern to British North Americans at the time) by fusing together all the disparate elements of British North America, but that in having a federal Parliament where representation was by population, enough powers could be ascribed to the provinces to safeguard regional and minority concerns and to protect civil rights, while empowering a national government, even if gradually, given British sensibilities and the state of American expansionist virility. The organizing confederal principle was strength of the whole at the level of defence, international relations, interprovincial transport, currency, and fiscal and monetary policy, but retention of all the particular preoccupations of the different colonies including both Canadas. The logic of the idea was now obvious, and it was the logical coruscation of the will to distinctive survival that first flickered up under Champlain and proved, against all odds, an inextinguishable flame after Jean Talon brought in enough (especially female) immigrants to make New France demographically, and then economically, self-sustaining. The French had to achieve a critical mass, which they had before France was ejected by Britain from North America, and then America had to secede from Britain and drive or spill enough English Loyalists into Canada to attract British protection against the Americans and give the Canadians the opportunity to control, populate, and develop all of the northern part of the continent (except Alaska), and the English and French Canadians had to learn to cooperate, which they did after Durham threw them together, in his obtuse English superiority, imagining that the English Canadians would then assimilate the French majority. Of such misjudgments was Canada born. This process had arrived at the point where the parts of British North America had to group together with the blessing and support of the British Empire. It had been a tortuous and implacable process, and even Confederation would not protect Canada from the power of America’s ability to dazzle and dominate by its overpowering success and panache. But it would give British North Americans a platform, and the only possible platform, from which they could fight to develop an identity, a national confidence, and international respect.

  In 1778, the chief British Army engineer in North America, Colonel Robert Morse, had wri
tten to Guy Carleton about the state of fortifications in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and added his strong suggestion of federation between these provinces and Lower Canada.73 According to D’Arcy McGee, who was emerging as one of the most brilliant Canadian politicians and the chief spokesman for Irish Catholics in Canada, the idea of Confederation originated with Richard John Uniacke, the attorney general of Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century, who submitted a scheme for colonial union to the British government in 1800. McGee also credited Jonathan Sewell, chief justice of Lower Canada from 1808 to 1838; Upper Canada Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, Lord Durham; Peter Stevens Hamilton, a Nova Scotia writer; and Alexander Morris, member of Parliament for Lanark South at mid-century, who advocated the measure in a pamphlet entitled “Nova Britannia.”

  George Brown, “a huge, earnest, clumsily vital man,”74 without initially desiring to do so, pushed Canada West toward Confederation by stirring up the hustings with the theory that English Canadians were being short-changed by the French. The French would not accept representation by population, as it would place too much power over them in the hands of crypto-francophobes and anti-papists like Brown. Brown considered the complete breakup of the Canadas as reactionary and a backward step, and he was an expansionist and advocate of extending Canada West beyond the Great Lakes and toward the Pacific. He wrote in January 1858 that the present arrangement was clearly inadequate and there were only three alternatives: legislative union with proportionate representation ensuring full powers to the cultural majority; federal union with some powers disposed by representation by population and others reserved to provinces; and dissolution of the union.75 He was pessimistic that the terms could be worked out adequately and thought it would be extremely difficult to bring in the Atlantic colonies, but he did not oppose it conceptually.