John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Hugh Macdonald’s most considerable accomplishment during his relatively short life was to marry Helen Shaw. It happened in 1811, when she was at the relatively advanced age of thirty-four and he at the comparatively tender one of twenty-eight. Helen was an exceptional woman, the rock upon which the small tribe took its stand facing outwards to the world, arms linked. She kept the family going through thin and thick. A surviving portrait of her, done in at least middle age, depicts accurately her rock-like qualities of strength and determination. “She was a little above the medium height, large limbed, and capable of much endurance,” commented the contemporary biographer E.B. Biggar.†3 read widely, and as Biggar wrote, “had she possessed the advantages of a high education, and the opportunities some get in life, she would have been a noted woman.”

  Helen Macdonald. She was determined that her son would make his mark in life.

  While the portrait of Helen Macdonald suggests the depth and liveliness of her eyes, it betrays little hint of the most attractive of her qualities—her capacity for gaiety. She and John A. loved to trade stories and jokes, his being the racier. Biggar commented, “She appreciated a droll saying or a droll situation.” Once, when Macdonald ascended to the social height of being elected president of Kingston’s St. Andrew’s Society, he led a gathering preceded by a piper to her house; when she heard the wail of the bagpipe, Helen came downstairs and danced a jig in the street.

  She was wholly Scots, and above all a Highlander. Her preferred language was Gaelic. Her father fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, and afterwards, as did many Scots, joined the British Army. She could be stonily stubborn, a quality that repeatedly taxed Macdonald’s talents once he became the de facto head of the family. She possessed an exceptional memory—a gift she passed on to her son—and functioned as the family historian and the teller of Highland tales.

  Of her children—two boys and two girls at the time of leaving Glasgow—there was never any doubt that her favourite was her elder son, John Alexander. “Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man,” she said on many occasions.

  Besides the push of failure at home, there were more positive attractions pulling the Macdonald family to Canada. Of these, the most apparent was that Hugh Macdonald, unlike the great majority of immigrants,*4 possessed the priceless asset of connections. In and around Kingston, the town where they were headed, there was a cluster of Macdonald relatives and cousins. That most were distant relatives mattered not the least; they all belonged to the same clan. The most important person by far was Colonel Donald Macpherson, who was married to Helen Macdonald’s stepsister. The colonel, who twice fought for King and Country against the Americans (during the War of Independence and the War of 1812), retired afterwards to the garrison town of Kingston, built a large stone house called Cluny (meaning “meadow”) and settled down as one of the community’s principal citizens. Before leaving Glasgow, Hugh Macdonald knew that Colonel Macpherson would find space in his house for him and his family for at least a transition time, and that afterwards Macpherson would help with advice and contacts as Hugh set up his first business.

  How much Hugh Macdonald knew about Canada before he left is unknowable. Information was available, however, in booklets such as The Emigrant’s Guide to the British Settlements in Upper Canada and the United States of America, published the same year that the Macdonalds left. In some ways, Canada was distinctly unappealing. Its total population was only a little more than half a million, the great majority being French-speaking Canadiens. The particular part of Canada where they were headed—Upper Canada (now Ontario)—had fewer than two hundred thousand people; mostly, the land was untouched, primeval forest broken here and there by the crude log shacks of pioneer settlers. All of Canada was incomparably poorer and less developed than any of the thirteen American colonies.

  Yet Canada possessed two considerable attractions. Land itself was free to most settlers. To the Macdonalds, this bounty was irrelevant, since they were headed for a town and not for a clearing in the wilderness. The country’s second general attraction, that there were no class divisions, was a derivative from the first and exactly fitted the ambitions, however muddled, of Hugh Macdonald. As the Scottish settler George Forbes wrote to his brother back in Aberdeenshire: “We in Canada have this glorious privilege that the ground we tred is our own and our children’s after us.” And he went on to describe the fundamental difference between Canada and any part of Britain, or indeed anywhere in Europe. “Here, we are lairds ourselves.”

  Had John A.’s parents moved from Glasgow to somewhere else in the British Isles, the upwards drive that Macdonald eventually undertook would have butted sooner or later against the steel ceiling of the British class system. In Canada, by contrast, there was no aristocracy at all other than a few fragments within the Family Compact—the small clique who, as politicians, public officials and judges, ran the country on behalf of the governor general. (Lower Canada, or Quebec, was markedly more hierarchical.) Instead, the vast majority of Canadians were either middle class or believed that they could become middle class, or, since the term “middle class” wasn’t yet used, they were “respectable” citizens—law-abiding, churchgoing, debt-free, or attempting diligently to be all three.

  The idea of classlessness was lodged deep in the Canadian consciousness from its very beginnings. In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie noted crossly of her servants, “They no sooner set foot upon the Canadian shores than…all respect for their employers, all subordination is at end.” She went on to record, though, that “with all their insolent airs of independence, I must confess that I prefer the Canadian to the European servant.”

  In fact, a respectable claim can be made that in one vital respect, the country Macdonald’s parents were taking him to was more democratic even than the United States, that great experiment in egalitarianism. In the South and in parts of New England, there was an aristocracy, and, in the North, a class of self-made millionaires who cascaded their wealth upon their heirs. Above the border there was virtually no over-class, but no under-class either. There were no slaves in Canada, they having been liberated by Governor John Graves Simcoe’s decree of 1793,*5 and there was no equivalent of the proletariat now developing rapidly in the great northern cities of the United States. Almost all Canadians were indeed “lairds,” in possibility and in self-perception, if not in actual fact. They could rise as high as their talent, ambition and luck might take them.

  It’s unknowable whether Hugh and Helen Macdonald had any idea of the benefit they were conferring on their elder son by bringing him to a society where, compared with almost any other society in the world, there were fewer barriers to whatever upwards rise he might attempt. But that’s what they did by not taking the well-travelled road down to London and, instead, taking a ship to a far away country in which there were just about no roads at all.

  TWO

  A Boy’s Town

  Remember, oh remember, the fascination of the turkey. John A. Macdonald, to a girl he owed a dance

  When the Macdonalds came up the St. Lawrence River from the Gulf in 1820, they would have seen the same strangely foreign prospect, at first impressive but after a while depressing, that Catharine Parr Traill described in The Backwoods of Canada a few years later: “I begin to grow weary of its immensity…we see nothing more than long lines of pine-clad hills with here and there white specks that they tell me are settlements.” At long last there was a real town—Quebec City. There, their ship, the small, 600-ton Earl of Buckingham, discharged its six hundred passengers, the Macdonalds included. Behind them, at last, were six weeks of the appalling food,*6 overcrowding, incessant lice and rats and complete lack of privacy that everyone in steerage experienced, along with the constant damp and seasickness that even those in cabin class endured. They must have been delighted to see the end of this decaying vessel—indeed, two years later it drifted into Galway Bay and broke up in pieces.

  Quebec City. A thriving port,
a British garrison town and the oldest city, by far, in Canada. This view is a steel engraving from a painting by William Bartlett prepared for his book Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1842).

  Left on the dock at Quebec City was the small tribe of Macdonalds, as well as their orphaned cousin Maria Clark, who had accompanied them on the voyage. It numbered Hugh and Helen Macdonald, both now in their forties, and their four children: Margaret, the oldest at seven, nicknamed Moll; then John A. and James, one year younger; and lastly two-year-old Louisa, known as Lou. (A fifth child, the first-born William, had died back in Glasgow.) Scots, unlike the English and even the Irish, to a lesser extent, almost never sent a single family member ahead to scout the terrain but moved any distance as a complete family.

  They would have been amazed by the scene that greeted them once they entered the port: endless lines of log rafts with a crude shack at their centre, stretching out for miles along the river and waiting to load the pontoons of huge, squared timbers they had brought all the way from the Ottawa Valley onto one of the same sailing ships that had just transported the immigrants. Their stop at Quebec City would have been exciting—lots of familiar redcoats and Royal Navy tars, but also the unfamiliar language of most of the local inhabitants. And they would have taken a little time to look over the sights—the massive hulk of the Citadel, the steep bank soaring upwards from the St. Lawrence over which Wolfe’s Highlanders had scrambled, the imposing churches and nunneries and the low stone houses packed together along narrow streets as in some Breton town.

  By now, the Macdonalds had completed barely half their journey. Beyond Quebec City there were no roads, or none that anyone would risk trying by stagecoach. Canada’s entire highway system was made up then of its rivers and lakes. (The one great cross-country trip, undertaken just for show, was Governor General Lord Sydenham’s amazing 1840 journey from Toronto to Montreal in a sleigh with a bed in it, completed in just thirty-six hours, a record that stood until the railways came along.)*7

  Their second voyage lasted some four weeks, first from Quebec City to Montreal, then on to Kingston. It would have been as uncomfortable as their ocean crossing. They made their way first in a bateau and then in a Durham boat, each open to the elements, moving slowly up the St. Lawrence, sometimes pushed by sail-power, sometimes pulled by oxen and by oars, but often both pulled and pushed by the male passengers as they jumped into the chill water to squeeze the boat past shallows and between rocks. On August 13, 1820, the family made it to Kingston. In Colonel Macpherson’s house, packed in with his own family, they could at last rest, eat properly, clean their clothes and, most important, begin to learn about their new country.

  Of all the towns in early Upper Canada where Hugh Macdonald might have gone, Kingston was perhaps the best possible place for an imaginative boy to grow up. With a population of around four thousand people, it was the biggest centre in the colony, even larger than York (to be renamed Toronto in 1834). Above all, it encompassed within its boundaries an uncommonly wide range of human experience.

  It had a military garrison of red-coated British soldiers, who regularly emerged from Fort Henry to march through the streets to the beat of drums and the peep of pipes. It was a port. Tied up alongside its finger piers jutting out from the shore, throughout the summer and into the fall, were thirty to forty sailing ships, from three-masters to fore-and-aft schooners, and, later, steamships belching columns of smoke as they prepared to chug off to York and Montreal, Oswego and Niagara. To the north, the dense, forbidding forest came close to the town’s limits; inside it, almost always hiding out of sight, were Indians. From spring to fall, waves of immigrants arrived in Kingston; after a few weeks’ rest and burdened down by provisions, the newcomers would head on, either westwards to the softer, richer country beyond the town of York or, by turning right at some point along Lake Ontario, plunge northwards into the forests to try their luck at some isolated spot as pioneers—in the manner of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill and their unhardy husbands. Kingston itself lacked a rural hinterland because the Precambrian Shield came right to the town, but farmers did well in the good soil of Prince Edward County some forty miles to the west and supplied the growing town with food.

  The Kingston of those days was rude and rowdy and raunchy rather than scrubbed and neat and dignified as today. It was also exceedingly dangerous. Immigrants often arrived riddled with disease, touching off a typhoid epidemic in 1828, a cholera epidemic in 1832, a truly terrible typhus epidemic in 1847 (during which 1,200 immigrants and townsfolk had to be buried in a mass grave) and yet another cholera outbreak in 1849. Soldiers and sailors brawled with each other and with the locals in incomparably rougher versions of the occasional town-gown confrontations of today.

  Kingston’s one constant has always been its history. Whoever occupied it commanded the entry point to the chain of Great Lakes as well as the exit point from the interior, on down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic. The French built Fort Frontenac as far back as 1673. The Loyalists arrived in 1784, laid out a plan of streets and housing plots, and drew lots for the best of them. The town’s importance as a transfer point for cargo and people would soon be enhanced by the construction, eastwards, of the Lachine Canal to Montreal and, northwards, of the Rideau Canal, snaking its way up to Bytown (later Ottawa). The starting point was the mouth of the Cataraqui River, which formed Kingston’s harbour.

  Kingston. When the Macdonalds arrived in 1820, it was Upper Canada’s largest town, with some four thousand people. It was also an important transshipment point for goods going up or down the St. Lawrence. Again, a view by William Bartlett.

  Later, a major share of Kingston’s historical aura would derive from its association with Macdonald. No other Canadian leader has ever been as intimately connected to any place as he was to Kingston. A boy when he arrived, he was educated and established himself in business there; he represented the town for the greater part of his political career, winning thirteen elections there; and he is buried in its Cataraqui Cemetery. Kingston still commemorates him on two occasions each year—the anniversaries of his birth and his death. Above all, Kingston provided Macdonald with the raw material for the greatest of his political gifts—his matchless understanding of life as it is actually lived and of people as they actually live it, with all their faults and follies, interspersed with occasional spasms of altruism and even idealism. Charles Dickens, who came through in 1842, dismissed Kingston as “a very poor town” had he stopped for a while, Dickens would have found it a microcosm of the human condition.

  Cows and sheep, pigs and chickens ran freely through Kingston’s streets, which, when it rained, were deep in mud, dirty and pungent from the leavings of animals—and sometimes of humans too. The only means by which a pedestrian could make it from one planked sidewalk to the opposite side of the road without sinking into the gummy, stinking mass was by using the occasional narrow crosswalk of flagstones or cobbles. The Precambrian Shield lay just below the surface, so the sewer system was primitive, with shallow and odiferous “privy pits.” In winter, workers carried the night soil onto the ice in the harbour, to slide to the bottom once spring arrived. Of course, all these things were standard in British North American towns in the early nineteenth century, their one aesthetic advance over today being the absence of any overhead tangle of telephone and hydro wires.

  Rural Canadians, who made up more than four in five of all Canadians, lived lives that for a great many were nasty, brutish, short and bitterly cold. Alexander Tilloch Galt, who would work alongside Macdonald in the battle for Confederation, provided a first-rate summary of country life in a report to his London bosses in a British land-settlement company: “A settlement in the backwoods of Canada, however romantic and pleasing may be the accounts generally published of it, has nothing but stern reality and hardship connected with it,” he wrote. “Alone in the woods in his log cabin with his family, tired from his day’s work and knowing that the morrow brings but the same toil, the migrant
will find but few of his fancies realized…for the first years, the emigrant to succeed must work as hard and suffer perhaps greater privations than had he remained in Great Britain.”

  Unlike today, though, conditions in the towns were, if anything, worse than those in the countryside—except, perhaps, for women, who suffered terribly from the loneliness of pioneer life. In towns and villages, women at least had companionship and some kind of support networks. But townies were much more likely than their country kin to succumb to diseases caused by everything from epidemics to poor or non-existent sanitation. Unlike pioneer settlers, they were self-sufficient neither in food nor in wood for winter fuel. In the towns, a great many jobs ended in early November; the ports closed because of ice, and all public works and construction were halted. At the same time that the price of food and firewood soared, the wages of those still at work in small manufacturing plants, stores and offices were often cut by a third or even half. As the winter wore on, workers spent as much as a fifth of their miserable wages on wood to keep themselves warm. The cost of bread typically went up by as much as 50 per cent. Commonly, those who had jobs went straight to bed when they returned to their barely heated lodgings. Some practical types even committed crimes so they would be sent to a partially heated jail. The late spring, when food and fuel prices were at their highest, was known as “the pinching season.”

  Yet, as historian Judith Fingard has noted, there was a conspicuous “absence of mass demonstrations and violent crime amongst the poor during the winters of greatest suffering.”*8 The poor were kept quiescent by exhaustion, by the bitter cold and, far from least, by a deep and seldom-questioned respect for the law. Macdonald learned all about this real, unromantic, urban Canada while he grew up in Kingston, and from his boyhood stays with his roving family in nearby Prince Edward County he gained an understanding of rural Canada as well.