by Conrad Black
All through January, the condition of the CPR became more precarious, as workers struck because of delays in pay, small creditors complained, and the usual voices of doom poisoned the wells in the London and New York markets. Stephen again besieged Macdonald, but the prime minister was advised by his cabinet, backbenchers, and influential friends that it could not be done again. He waited for the implications of the failure of the project to drag grumbling politicians to their senses. Stephen and Smith again advanced their own money, $650,000, to pay the January dividend. Blake congratulated Macdonald for not mentioning the railway in the Throne Speech. Macdonald declined to show his hand on the railway, as he declined British urging to outline a fisheries policy opposite the United States – the Americans had cancelled the treaty, and they could propose what would replace it – but he did announce that it was no longer acceptable for the federal electorate to be determined by provincial officials. Macdonald also abstained from the war hysteria that afflicted the country and the whole Empire after word arrived on February 6, 1885, of the massacre of General Gordon and his men by the Mahdi at Khartoum. The reluctant Gladstone had already sent the versatile Imperial enforcer Wolseley to Khartoum, where he arrived two days late and withdrew. (Wolseley was then immortalized by Gilbert and Sullivan as “the very model of a modern major general.” Gordon was not avenged until General H. H. Kitchener defeated the Mahdist army at Omdurman in 1898 and occupied most of the Sudan and imprisoned the surviving murderers of Gordon.) Macdonald played this coolly also, taking the position that Canada would participate if the entire Empire was under threat, but not in local disturbances. He wrote to Tupper, “Why should we waste money and men on this wretched business? Our men and money would be sacrificed to get Gladstone & Co. out of the hole they have plunged themselves into by their own imbecility.”56 If the North-West flared up again in Canada as it had fifteen years before, Canada would deal with it and not ask for relief from Britain as Macdonald had on the earlier occasion.
The tempo of the North-West crisis was swifter: a petition arrived on January 5 which appeared not to be from Riel but enumerated the familiar demands. The cabinet concluded that it would establish the number of Métis and distribute to them the land and paper money they had requested, though Macdonald told the House, “Well for God’s sake let them have the scrip; they will either drink it or waste it or sell it; but let us have peace.” The payments were made, but peace was not so easily had. The Métis regarded this step as a delaying tactic. Riel met with the local priest, Father Alexis André, and a member of the North-West Council, who represented in a summary of the four-hour meeting to Macdonald that Riel offered to fold the unrest in exchange for a sizeable payoff for himself. Macdonald declined this overture. The fact is that Riel was by now suffering from intermittent dementia and had a delusionally messianic view of his own religious significance. He had lapsed into what the Roman Catholic hierarchy considered to be heresy, including his assertion that Montreal’s Bishop Bourget should immediately be recognized as pope. By mid-March, the atmosphere was becoming very fraught, with a good many local threats of recourse to violence. And Riel put out feelers to Cree chiefs Poundmaker and Big Bear for a solid front. (It was only nine years since Sitting Bull had defeated the 7th Cavalry and killed General Custer and his men at the Little Bighorn in Montana.) On March 23, Macdonald sent General Frederick Middleton, commander of the Canadian militia, to Winnipeg, and the next day Leif Crozier of the North-West Mounted Police and a force of one hundred of his men were attacked at Fort Carlton. (The same day, George Stephen was advised that negotiations were over and concluded that Canadian Pacific would have to declare bankruptcy.) On March 27, Macdonald rose in the House to reveal that there had been a military encounter with armed rebels at Duck Lake, in the District of Saskatchewan, and that an insurrection was in progress.
He seized on the brilliant improvisation of tying the North-West and Canadian Pacific crises together. Macdonald explained with some apology what he called his “crude” strategy to General Middleton: he would accelerate consideration of the Métis land claims and make placatory overtures to the Indian leaders, starting with enlisting the locally trusted Father Albert Lacombe (1827–1916), a missionary who persuaded the Blackfoot chief Crowfoot to stay clear of the Métis disturbance. Orders were given at once to increase provisions for the native people throughout the West in an ex gratia goodwill gesture. The other side of his pincer movement from this goodwill offensive was to dispatch forces at once and utilize the railway. Instead of asking for Imperial troops and waiting three months, as he had with Wolseley’s military mission in 1870, while the breakup of the ice in the St. Lawrence occurred and the endless portages of the route west of Lake Superior were undertaken, large numbers of trained volunteers came forward at once and the Canadian Pacific Railway transported them swiftly across most of the route to the Saskatchewan country. Volunteer units marched through the main streets of eastern cities on March 29 and 30 and entrained. Van Horne saw to their arrival at Winnipeg starting on April 4, and on April 9 Middleton led the advance guard in an attack on Riel’s headquarters, where he claimed to have established another provisional government, at Batoche. Riel had not counted at all on the ability of the Canadian militia and railway system, and assumed that he could dither and negotiate for three months, as he had before. Nor had Riel had the tactical sense to try to entice the United States to do some of his bidding and frighten the British, which the Americans were now very capable of doing. The American media dutifully reported, and the London newspapers credulously repeated, that Canada was facing a full-scale Indian uprising. The Americans became neurotically sensitive at the thought that Canada could manage through its problems with the native people without the bloodshed and setbacks that even battle-seasoned U.S. forces had endured, from Fallen Timbers in 1794 to the Little Bighorn in 1876.
In fact, Macdonald’s standing force and the still-abuilding national railway effectively snuffed out the rebellion before it could take hold. On April 16, Van Horne informed Stephen, who told Macdonald, that Canadian Pacific could no longer pay its employees and the entire operation could collapse at any moment. Still Macdonald waited, eight more days, and then, on April 24, telegraphed the Bank of Montreal that legislation to assist Canadian Pacific would be presented to Parliament imminently. The prime minister was advised that that would not do, unless the legislation was actually presented. This was nervy treatment of the head of the government, and on April 25 came news from the North-West of the arrival of a column of troops at Battleford and also of an indecisive engagement at Fish Creek. The Canadian public was aroused, an insurrection was in progress, and the national railway, on the verge of completion, was also about to collapse and shut down. The perils of the birth of Canada were undiminished nearly twenty years after the launch of the country. On May 1, Macdonald gave parliamentary notice of a rescue plan for the railway that consisted of cancelling the entire mortgage on its assets and the thirty-five million new shares and replacing them with thirty-five million dollars of new mortgage bonds which would secure an immediate further cash advance of five million dollars. On May 2, there had been another sharp and close engagement at Cut Knife Hill, but on May 13 Adolphe-Philippe Caron (1843–1908), the minister of militia and defence, read the House of Commons a telegram from Middleton recording the capture of Batoche and the collapse of the Métis uprising.
Macdonald, alone of the senior ministers, retained the stamina for what he called the most difficult and fierce debate of his forty-two years of parliamentary activity, and on June 16 he got through his franchise bill, taking the composition of the federal electorate into federal hands, and then jammed through the railway relief bills over the next several weeks. A terribly bitter and exhausting session ended on July 27, but it was one of John A. Macdonald’s greatest triumphs: the crushing of revolt by domestic forces and assurance of the completion of one of the engineering marvels of the world in the transcontinental railroad, while, with infinite reluct
ance, the government of the United States hinted that it would have to deal with Canada to satisfy the New England fishermen. Macdonald’s dream was taking shape in tangible form at last. It had been the genius of using two terrible crises as the justification for, and method of, resolution of each other – one of the most difficult and stylish techniques of crisis management – and if Macdonald had misjudged the timing, or the appropriate level of determination, or lost the stamina to manage and control it all himself, including in a parliamentary session that lasted two and a half days without interruption, it all would have collapsed, and the young country would have gone down with it.
The Métis had very substantive grievances, but Riel’s movement was a fraud, and Riel was of doubtful sanity and probity. He was chiefly preoccupied with a messianic mission he generally believed he possessed, and was apart from that preoccupied with feathering his nest. Of the 779 Métis petitioners, it emerged that 586 of them were ineligible, either as settlers who had no ethnic claim, as Métis who had already been paid and were coming back to the well, or as Americans who were just grazing in Canada with cupped hands in a false cause. Macdonald managed a partial reorganization of cabinet, as Tilley departed (to become again the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick), by securing the nomination of John David Thompson of Halifax as minister of justice. Thompson was very highly regarded but had the political disadvantage of being a Roman Catholic convert and was, at more than 225 pounds, significantly overweight for his height of five feet seven inches, which affected his cardiological condition.
The trial of Louis Riel ended in Regina on August 1. The jury of six Protestant men found him guilty and recommended mercy, but the judge sentenced him to be hanged. A sharp division developed not so much along sectarian lines, as Riel’s claim to being a Roman Catholic was now tenuous and the Church was not altogether enthused about him, but along French-English ones. There was not as much sympathy for the Métis as there should have been, given the generally shabby treatment of them. The French Canadians wished for clemency; the English Canadians, including most Roman Catholics among them, wanted him hanged without delay or mercy. Riel had the benefit of excellent counsel, and when Macdonald granted the necessary reprieve, they pressed Riel’s appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which did not normally hear criminal cases. The petition was dismissed on October 22. At the trial, Riel’s counsel had argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, but Riel had confounded their efforts by proclaiming his sanity and acting accordingly. Three prominent doctors were invited to opine on Riel’s present mental condition, as they had no perspective on his mental state at the time of the offence.
The Riel and Canadian Pacific dramas went right to the wire together, as the railway was rushing to drive the last spike in the Rocky Mountain passes before the weather became too difficult, and the Riel commission was working to a similar deadline, though because of the political weather only. Donald Smith drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7, 1885. The medical evidence on Riel was in by November 10: two of the doctors found Riel accountable, and the other felt he was sensible in political matters but not religious subjects, but did not allow for the two to be confused in Riel’s mind. There are indications that Riel ardently wished to be executed, and if his goal was fame and martyrdom, that was the correct decision. One of the jurors said Riel was really condemned for the murder of Thomas Scott in 1869, and Macdonald, when the medical opinions were in, allegedly said, rather coarsely, “Riel will hang though every dog in Quebec barks.” Louis Riel was given the comforts of the Roman Catholic Church in his last days, and immediately after reciting that Church’s version of the Lord’s Prayer with Father André on the morning of November 16, 1885, was precipitated through the trapdoor of the gallows to his destiny. His pulse required four minutes to stop and he died of strangulation, but he probably lost consciousness at once. Macdonald seems to have realized that Riel’s execution could be a problem for his party in Quebec; there is little doubt that by contemporary standards there was real doubt about Riel’s lucidity, and Macdonald could easily have guided the case in that direction. If Riel was determined to die for his cause, Macdonald may have been equally determined that he do so, to emphasize Canada’s seriousness and for his own gratification at the end of one of his and Canada’s most eventful years, and of a crisis that had shadowed most of the brief history of Confederation.
4. The Last Victories of the Old Chieftain, 1886–1891
Macdonald travelled to Britain a week after the execution of Riel, and even in the crisp and dark humidity of December he found London and its environs invigorating. He rejoiced in the electoral victory of Lord Salisbury, but it was very precarious, and the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stuart Parnell held the balance of power. Macdonald met with Salisbury at the Foreign Office on January 4, 1886. As he made the rounds in London, he received reports of the conversion of the Quebec Liberal Party, which had held the government of that province for only one year since Confederation, to the Parti National, led by Honoré Mercier, who was breathing fire about the death of Riel. His new party, purportedly a Liberal-Conservative, all-French coalition party, kicked off with a mass meeting at the Champ de Mars in Montreal, where thirty-seven orators succeeded each other in panegyrics about the “government of hangmen” in Ottawa. Even Wilfrid Laurier, the rising federal Liberal star, who had briefly been Alexander Mackenzie’s revenue minister and had been in Parliament since 1874, after three years in the Quebec Legislature, allowed that if he had lived on the banks of the Saskatchewan, he would have taken up a rifle too. Macdonald came down with a nasty cold and missed the Riel debate, where Hector-Louis Langevin’s grasp of tactics and Thompson’s of the legal issues, and his powerful summing-up address in his first test as justice minister, carried the House and caused the rejection of a Quebec Conservative private member’s bill censoring Riel’s execution by 146 to 52. The successful end of the North-West affair and the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and its efficient performance in putting down the uprising, had ended the commercial death watch in London and New York and shut down the railway’s critics. As Tilley had become lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick (again), the new finance minister was Archibald Woodbury McLelan, who had the pleasure of announcing that Barings had refinanced the CPR’s bonds and that the entire debt of the company to the Canadian government had been paid off in the six months since the last spike was driven.
The Territorial Evolution of Canada and the Building of the Railways
In foreign affairs, Macdonald, now in a position of comparative strength, had declined the proposal of Cleveland’s secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, that Canada allow the Americans into Canadian fishing waters without the United States relaxing tariffs against Canadian fish. As Macdonald said of Bayard to Governor General Lansdowne, “He appeals to us as good neighbours to do what he does not offer as a good neighbour to do to us.”57 So Macdonald ordered that Canadian authorities enforce the Rush-Bagot Convention of 1818 and prevent American vessels from fishing in Canadian waters. The American fishing ship David J. Adams was seized in Digby Harbour in May 1886. This quickly aroused American outrage, and the U.S. government, as was its wont, ignored Ottawa and demanded that the British rein in their bumptious colonial minions and yokels. Gladstone, briefly back in office for the third time, and his colonial secretary, Granville, telegraphed Lansdowne to reserve Macdonald’s Fisheries Bill as soon as it was passed by the House. Once again, Canada was facing the opposition of both great Anglo-Saxon powers. This was a distinct and humiliating defeat, though Macdonald undoubtedly had domestic opinion with him on the issue. However, Mercier was looking more and more like the winner of the next Quebec election, and in Nova Scotia the Liberal William Stevens Fielding swept the spring elections on a platform of seceding from Confederation; Nova Scotia had been hard hit by the decline of the West Indies trade.
Macdonald took his summer holiday in 1886 on a transcontinental train trip, depa
rting for the West on July 10. He went through the Rocky Mountain passes seated high on the engine with his wife in front of the smoke stack, with an astonishing view of the breathtaking scenery and marvels of engineering by which the road had been laid. Macdonald had a very agreeable meeting with his old ally Crowfoot, who had helped rally the native people against the Métis insurrection. On July 24, they arrived at Port Moody, and Macdonald simulated Sir Alexander Mackenzie nearly a century before and said, “From Canada by rail.”58 The Canadian Pacific steamer Princess Louisa took the party on to Victoria.
They returned to Ottawa on August 30. Macdonald’s chief concern was to have Britain lift the reserve of his Fisheries Bill and secure Royal Navy support in policing the enforcement of the Rush-Bagot Agreement so he could get the attention of the United States, and he sent Lansdowne on this mission, pleased that Salisbury had turned the tables on Gladstone and now appeared to be in office for a full term. On October 14, Mercier almost won the Quebec election; there was no clear winner, but the Conservative regime in that province was tottering. Mercier emerged as head of a Liberal–Parti National coalition and was sworn in as premier on January 30, 1887. He was soon calling for a federal-provincial conference to agree a redistribution of powers. Undeterred by this and by the rigours of the Canadian winter, Macdonald called an election, campaigned with all his old energy, and on February 23 was re-elected to a fifth term as prime minister of the Dominion after three terms as co-leader of the Province of Canada (and back again for the twelfth time as MP for Kingston). It was close enough: 124 constituencies to 80 for the Liberals, and 50.7 per cent of the vote to 48.9 per cent.