by Conrad Black
All parts of what was striving to become a united, federal, Canada were pursuing the common goal, as the U.S. Civil War moved toward a bone-crushing Union victory, an eventuality that would require maximum Canadian preparedness, the avoidance of even the slightest provocation of the United States, and the lock-step support of Great Britain. Cartier had had a rather worrisome visit to Washington in 1864, now much more confident of the Union cause than on the occasion of his visit a year earlier, and 1864 proved a year of unbroken northern victory. The purpose of his visit was to urge the renewal of the Reciprocity agreement, which would otherwise expire in 1866. He found the Senate foreign relations committee chairman, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist firebrand who admired Canada’s reception of fugitive slaves, quite pleasant, but William H. Seward was protectionist and prickly about the various abrasions that had occurred. Cartier did not meet the president on this visit.
On October 20, 1864, a party of twenty-five Confederates living in Canada crossed into Vermont, robbed a bank of $210,000 and killed someone, injured twenty other people, and burned down much of the town of St. Albans, Vermont. Cartier attended upon Monck who ordered the militia to arrest the raiders, who had retired back to Canada, and they were rounded up just before an American posse caught up with them ten miles inside the border with Lower Canada. Cartier and some of his colleagues met with the American consul in Montreal and pledged absolute Canadian neutrality and made placatory noises in all directions, which the British amplified. Cartier handled the settling down of the affair with vintage Canadian genius for cooling things out through endless palaver and intricate formalities. He had the American demand for extradition brought before Taché’s son-in-law, police magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol, and assigned three prominent defence counsel to the defendants, who were led by a theology student at the University of Toronto from Kentucky, Bennett Young. The defence counsel were the future prime minister of Canada. J.J.C. Abbott, William Kerr, and Rodolphe Laflamme (who assigned some of the work to his law clerk, Louis Riel, who will reappear prominently in the next chapter). Abbott endlessly and monotonously cross-examined the defendants and called for delays for various formalities, and finally challenged Coursol’s jurisdiction to hear an extradition matter, an impeachment which Coursol swiftly conceded. Cartier made another visit to Washington, was cordially received by President Lincoln, and even Seward commended him and the Canadians as exemplary neighbours, and the whole issue just faded away after the Canadian Parliament voted restitution to the violated Vermont bank and a strict alien law, and Cartier had the perpetrators imprisoned for a time for common assault. Lincoln was reelected, General Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground the day after the election and cut across Georgia to the sea at Savannah, scorching everything to ashes on a path more than a hundred miles wide, before turning into the Carolinas. Few could have imagined that the great American experiment could come to such a terrible, noble combat.
The Canadian federalists, many of them of recent persuasion but with the fervour of conversion, were trying to race the Union armies. Grant and Sherman were now unstoppable, and rolled up what was left of the Confederacy from both ends. Lincoln was reinaugurated on March 4, 1865 and famously promised to abolish slavery “even if God wills that all the treasure piled up by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and that every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be repaid by … the sword.” And he promised “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.” Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9 in a very gracious and dignified meeting with his former subordinate, and Sherman, like Grant as magnanimous in victory as he was relentless in combat, received the surrender of the southern Confederate forces eight days later.
In the meantime, Lincoln was assassinated. An untried Tennessean auto-didact, Andrew Johnson, chosen for vice president because he was the only southern senator who remained loyal to the Union, became president. Power passed to the leaders of the Congress, who were, fortunately for Canada, more interested in a Carthaginian Peace with the South than in tangling with the British Empire. While the Union Army occupied the South, the pressures to demobilize the mighty armies of Grant and Sherman and restore the integrity of the diluted currency, prevailed over thoughts of plunging into a new war with Britain over Canada, though the prospect excited some orators and editorialists. It had been a horrible war, in which 750,000 had died and nearly 500,000 were wounded in an American population of 32 million. Canada and Britain pressed noiselessly on toward a new era in Canada while the Americans settled scores in a manner that bore no resemblance to the peace of reconciled brothers that the great Lincoln favoured and would have pursued.
There was prolonged debate in the Canadian and other colonial Parliaments on the Quebec Resolutions, and all the members of the Coalition shared the burden of the discussion. Sandfield Macdonald and Dorion led the only knots of outright resistance but there were endless demands for clarification and reassurance, especially on the Intercolonial Railway, without which New Brunswick would rescind its adherence. Cardwell laid the burden of defence on the Canadians; Jervois had recommended 200,000 pounds for the fortification of Quebec but London only provided 50,000, and Palmerston found Gladstone “troublesome and wrong-headed” on the whole issue of supporting Canada.83 On March 4, 1865, Tilley, the capable and firmly federalist premier of New Brunswick, was defeated in his election and that province effectively withdrew from the Quebec arrangements, and a fluish Macdonald yet carried the argument in Parliament with his contention that union was not the only issue in that election and that, in any case, the result was not permanent and was a cause to accelerate union and not postpone, amend, or reconsider it. The leaders of the coalition, Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Galt, and McGee, repaired to London to lobby Westminster and were splendidly feted and warmly received, even by the querulous Gladstone. They straggled back to Canada in the early summer, after, in Macdonald’s case, he had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and amid “the saturnalia of undergraduate Oxford … the well-known melodrama of grave ceremony and uproarious fun was once more re-enacted” at the Sheldonian Theatre.84
Sir Étienne Taché died on July 30, 1865, and Monck asked Macdonald to become the formal head of the government, as he was the de facto head of it. Brown threatened to break up the government if the triumviral equality of Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown were altered, and the comparatively unexceptional Sir Narcisse Belleau, an understudy of Taché’s on the Legislative Council, was selected as a compromise nominal premier. Once again, as before the Great Coalition was formed, the move to Confederation stalled; the British did nothing and the government had nothing to say or do to advance defence or railway construction. Bafflement and suspense reigned as the Assembly rose for the late summer. New pressures arose from the United States, as the Irish recruits and draftees demobilized from the U.S. Army flocked in large numbers to militant Irish Fenian organizations along the border and began conducting raids into Canada.
Palmerston died on October 18, 1865, two days short of his eighty-first birthday, after a public career of more than fifty years. His last words were alleged, perhaps apocryphally, to have been, to his doctor: “Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do.” He was the first statesman and only the fourth commoner (after Isaac Newton, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington) to receive a state funeral in Britain. Russell replaced him as an interim leader, but the fifteen-year era of Gladstone and Disraeli was about to open.
Tilley’s chief colleague in New Brunswick, Charles Fisher, was returned to his provincial house in a by-election in November, and federalist hopes in that province improved. Macdonald had largely financed Fisher’s campaign with private funds from Canada West. Repeated Fenian raids, including in New Brunswick, were practically ineffectual, but stirred opinion in Canada and embarrassed the United States; not even the most jingoistic American expansionist wished the mighty American Union to
advance on the coat-tails of this rag-tag of Irish bigots and hooligans, much less to be dragged into war with the British Empire over their antics. George Brown did resign from the government in December 1865, but did not withdraw his support for the Quebec Resolutions or take out against the ministry; he was dissatisfied on the single issue of the attempt to renew the Reciprocity Agreement with the United States which he felt was being mismanaged, and which did expire.
On May 31, 1866, the Fenians led their main attack across the border at Niagara Falls, and killed nine Canadian militiamen and wounded thirty before being repulsed and chased back across the border. There was a tremendous firming up of Canadian opinion, and large votes of defence estimates by Parliament that pleased the British and even attracted the notice of the Americans. It was a purposeful reaction to an outrageous provocation. On June 12, Tilley and Fisher were returned to office in New Brunswick bringing that province back onside the Quebec Resolutions. Despite a febrile atmosphere in Canada in the aftermath of the Fenian incursion, and a governmental crisis in Britain which caused the downfall of Russell and the return for the third time, of the Earl of Derby as prime minister and Benjamin Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, Maritime delegates embarked for London, hoping to get approval and enactment of the Quebec Resolutions. Russell and Cardwell pledged their support on this to Derby, Disraeli, and the new colonial secretary, the very capable and well informed Earl of Carnarvon. But Macdonald and the other Canadians declined to make the trip, seeing no prospect of ratification in that session. In the midst of all this toing and froing, and as Britain sent military reinforcements to Canada, and the government of Canada moved to its new quarters in Ottawa, Brown launched an attack in the Globe against Macdonald’s intemperance, that is, drunkenness. In the circumstances, it was an amusing divertissement in a tense time, as the Maritime leaders fumed and carped in London. Joseph Howe, the Nova Scotia opposition leader, was at this point a strenuous opponent of Confederation, and he had some currency in London, because of his rebuttal of Russell’s Ten Resolutions twenty years before.
It was finally agreed that the Canadian delegates would depart for London in November, and they arrived and started the final conference for the preparation of the British enabling legislation at the Westminster Palace Hotel, facing Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret’s Church, Parliament Square and the Parliament buildings and Big Ben, on December 4, 1866. Macdonald was elected conference chairman. It proceeded well until Macdonald fell asleep with his candle still burning on the night of December 12, and was badly burned by a fire in his bedroom that he and Cartier and Galt put out with the water from the jugs in their rooms. They were working against the deadline of a Nova Scotia election that would come in the spring and that Howe would likely win. Macdonald sent Carnarvon the refined agreement for transmission into a legislative bill on Christmas Day. The only problem the British had, as they prepared for the tense consideration and debate of what would be the Second Reform Bill, another great expansion of the franchise, was the fixing of the size of the Senate, unlike the flexible numbers of the British House of Lords. It was agreed that a small number of additional senators could be appointed. Another problem arose over Macdonald’s reference to the Kingdom of Canada, which fussed Derby, whom his chief colleague for over twenty years, Disraeli, described as always “in a region of perpetual funk.” (Certainly this had been his approach to Canada as colonial secretary when he was Lord Stanley.) Derby was concerned because this terminology had raised a question in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman H.J. Raymond. “Dominion of Canada” was devised as a compromise. The British North America Bill was quickly finalized and introduced for first reading in the House of Lords on February 12, 1867. Four days later, John A. Macdonald, whose first wife had died some years before, remarried, Susan Agnes Bernard, daughter of a Privy Councillor, at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square. The bishop of Montreal officiated, daughters of the members of the Canadian delegation (Misses McDougall, McGee, Tupper, and Archibald) were bridesmaids, and the toast to the bride at the banquet at the Westminster Palace Hotel was given by the bridegroom’s old but friendly adversary, Francis Hincks, now governor of British Guiana, but a friend of the bride’s family from when he was governor of Jamaica. As distinguished historian Richard Gwyn remarked, it was the end of solitude and thereafter, as some of his wife’s relatives lived with them, “Macdonald had in-laws the way other people had mice.”85
Joseph Howe was in London and agitating, with a petition signed by thirty thousand Nova Scotians against Confederation, but Carnarvon spoke powerfully in the House of Lords in favour of the bill, and was very effectively supported by Monck, speaking as a viscount and as sitting governor general of the United Province of Canada. It went through committee without difficulty and little notice was taken of Howe’s petition. The passage through the House of Commons was in gaps between intense and contestatious discussion of Disraeli’s generous expansion of the franchise, the Second Reform Bill, which, he good humouredly acknowledged, was designed “to dish the Whigs.” Carnarvon’s minister in the Commons, Sir Charles Adderley, did a workmanlike job, and was strongly supported by Cardwell, as Carnarvon and Monck had been in the Lords by Russell. The Radical leader, John Bright, spoke against the bill, and advanced the Joseph Howe argument, but received little support. Macdonald and the other senior delegates had a private audience with Queen Victoria, who welcomed them warmly and expressed strong support for the legislation and the new status of the emergent Dominion. The British North America Act was adopted on March 4, 1867, to be formally enacted in Canada on July 1 (by royal proclamation of May 22). The future Marquess of Salisbury resigned in protest against Disraeli’s Second Reform Bill, as did Carnarvon, a week later, but the Canadians were clear of the imbroglio, and the British Parliament, with even Gladstone speaking in favour, endorsed the promised guaranty for the Intercolonial Railway that Watkin had created and connected to the Grand Trunk, represented with unfailing agility by Cartier. It had all been a superb piece of management and statesmanship, chiefly by Macdonald and secondly by Cartier, but with the help of many others. Carnarvon called upon his colleagues in the proverbial Mother of Parliaments to “rejoice that we have shown neither indifference to (the Canadians’) wishes nor jealousy of their aspirations, but that we … fostered their growth, recognizing in it the conditions of our own greatness.”86 He predicted that Canada would grow to be one of the great nations of the world. It was the greatest birth of a new nation in the world since the American Revolution, though that honour would soon pass to the reunified Italy and the newly united Germany.
The birth of a new nation, the consummation of the genius of Champlain and Carleton, of Baldwin and LaFontaine, and of those who would actually create it, was at hand. The embryo that existed in New France a century after Champlain founded Quebec, which had become a mysterious conception a century later at the time of the War of 1812, was now, obviously, an autonomous country of novel composition and immense proportions, about to be born.
* It has been a well-respected school with many eminent people as old boys, but it carried some of the snobbery, severity, and philistinism of its founder forward more than 125 years to the time there of the author.
* The phrase was coined by John O’Sullivan (1813–1895) in the Democratic Review but was made famous by the New York Morning News on December 27, 1845.
* Before Dunn, Craig, Prevost, Drummond, Sherbrooke, Kempt, Richmond, Dalhousie, Aylmer, Gosford, Colborne, and Durham.
* Cunard, 1787–1865, was a pioneer in the age of steam, which at sea and in the development of railroads was revolutionizing all transport. There was already much talk of a railroad from Halifax to Montreal. Cunard Line ships would be among the most famous passenger vessels and war-time troop carriers in all history, including the Mauretania, Aquitania, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. He was an early opponent of any racial discrimination and reprimanded his own officials for conveying the Afr
ican-American leader Frederick Douglass to Britain in segregated accommodation.
PART II
Dominion:
1867–1949
John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), effectively co-leader of the opposition in the United Province of Canada 1862–1864 (when this photograph was taken), and sole leader in the Dominion of Canada 1873–1878, and co-leader of the United Province 1856–1862 and 1864–1867, and prime minister of Canada 1867–1873 and 1878–1891, principal father of Canadian Confederation and founder of the Conservative Party of Canada, and the preeminent figure in Canadian public life for nearly forty years. Sly, imaginative, bold, and colourful, only Canada’s comparatively modest size kept him from general acceptance in the company of the world’s greatest statesmen in the second half of the nineteenth century with Lincoln, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Cavour, and Bismarck.
CHAPTER 4
Macdonald and the World’s First Transcontinental, Bicultural, Parliamentary Confederation