John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  By sheer luck, the magnificent, if magnificently expensive, Parliament Buildings were completed by Confederation Day. This photo shows a military review in front of the West Block, on May 24, 1867.

  Nevertheless, the grandeur and scale of the Parliament Buildings cast its defects deep into the shade. By building it, Canadians had pulled off “a visionary, if slightly uncertain, idea in the wilderness,” in the words of historian Sandra Fraser Gwyn in her splendid book The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier. They had, that is, actually dared to dare.

  Macdonald’s immediate concern on entering the capital that would be his home for the next quarter-century was far less how best to arrange the celebrations for the new country’s birthday than—naturally—the politics of Canada’s now imminent accouchement. Once Governor General Monck had advised him officially that he would become Canada’s first prime minister, Macdonald knew he would have to form a government. To do that, he would have to form a cabinet. When it assembled, the first item of business would be to call an election soon after Confederation Day. Only after Macdonald had won an election would he become Canada’s real prime minister, possessing a mandate rather than just the title.

  About his cabinet, Macdonald had long ago settled on its single most important characteristic—it would include Reformers. Their presence would enable him to claim that the old Liberal-Conservative coalition still breathed. At a minimum, the side benefit would be to infuriate the opposition, now more and more calling themselves Liberal-Reformers, or just Liberals; the maximum benefit could be to divide them. Macdonald therefore retained in his new cabinet the three holdover Reformers from the Confederation administration, the most important being William McDougall, originally a Grit, now a Reformer, and well on his way to becoming a Conservative, a progress across the political map that earned him the nickname Wandering Willie. The freshman Maritime provinces would each have two ministers. To further constrain Macdonald’s manoeuvring room, Cartier was adamant he would accept nothing less than three posts for bleu Quebecers. As well, one Quebec spot had to be kept open for Galt to re-enter the cabinet as finance minister. In these circumstances, no Quebec cabinet seat would be left for Confederation’s poet laureate, D’Arcy McGee. Excluding him would be a severe blow to McGee’s pride; he had already written to Macdonald that he would “give way neither to Galt, nor to a third Frenchman, ‘nor to any other man.’”

  To soften McGee’s sense of rejection, Macdonald resorted to the device of rejecting another senior member of the Confederation team so that McGee would not twist alone in the wind. His choice was Charles Tupper. Macdonald already owed him a great deal. He now owed him even more, because this Nova Scotian, with great generosity, agreed to stand aside. On Tupper’s advice, Macdonald telegraphed an amiable but otherwise anonymous backbencher, Edward Kenny, the unexpected news of his elevation to cabinet. A dry-goods merchant known as “Papa,” Kenny had the great virtue of being a Catholic, so could compensate for the exclusion of his co-religionist McGee. Kennedy only just made it to Ottawa from Nova Scotia in time for the swearing-in.*179 Among the other Maritime representatives was of course New Brunswick’s Leonard Tilley.

  By his first cabinet choices, Macdonald showed that he understood a cardinal function of Canadian cabinet making: that the duties of the ministers would be not only to run the country but to represent the country to itself. In a tacit admission that the Senate he had just constructed could never serve, unlike its U.S. equivalent, as the regions’ representative at the centre, Macdonald fashioned his cabinet into a rough simulacrum of the nation’s regions and religions. This practice—ever more finely tuned to accommodate an ever-expanding spectrum of ethnic and other identity claims—has been followed since. Macdonald’s handicap was that, while contemporary prime ministers can stretch their cabinets to almost any size, he had to squeeze his choices into a Procrustean bed of just thirteen cabinet portfolios. For himself, Macdonald chose the new portfolio of minister of justice. In a radical change from the past, this post now encompassed the duties of both of the previous attorneys general, for Upper and Lower Canada. The salary for all ministers remained at the pre-Confederation level of five thousand dollars a year.

  Composing the cabinet by no means ended Macdonald’s tasks as national personnel manager. If Canada needed a government, so, no less, did Ontario and Quebec, neither of which yet existed legally. As well, neither of these two new, but old, provinces had a lieutenant-governor. Macdonald, who had called these officials “chief executive officers,” looked on them as key performers in his plan to perpetuate a strong central government that would, besides other accomplishments, reduce the provinces to “mere municipalities.” Viewed thus, his choice for Ontario was decidedly odd. Its first lieutenant-governor was Major-General Henry Stisted, a British officer whose most considerable attainment was to have married the sister of the celebrity explorer Sir Richard Burton. Not until one year later, when Stisted resigned and returned to Britain, did the reason for Macdonald’s choice become apparent. He then filled this much-sought-after post with William Howland, a Reformer who, by accepting a cabinet post in advance of the 1867 election, had helped insinuate a minimal credibility into Macdonald’s claim that his government was a Liberal-Conservative one. Filling the lieutenant-governorship post in Quebec was easy: Macdonald’s choice was Sir Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau, who had served Macdonald as titular premier of the Great Coalition. The choice for Quebec’s first premier was made by the Quebec Conservatives themselves: he was Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, a cultured intellectual who implemented some important educational reforms but was politically a naïf. He too ended up in the Senate, but missed out on a knighthood.

  The appointment that took everybody by surprise was Macdonald’s choice for the first premier of Ontario. A good deal more useful than being merely surprising, his selection involved one of the most adroit political seductions that Macdonald ever consummated. His choice for the post was his own namesake, John Sandfield Macdonald. As the first Conservative premier of Confederation’s largest province, “Little John” Macdonald harboured two substantial disqualifications: he was a lifelong Reformer (he had firmly rejected earlier attempts by Macdonald to seduce him), and he had been Upper Canada’s best-known anti-Confederate. His compensating assets were yet considerable. As a former premier, he commanded credibility. As a Catholic, he brought Irish votes to the Conservatives, federally as well as provincially, along with the other Irishmen Macdonald had already bonded to the party by his alliance with the Orange Order. Most desirable of all, John S. Macdonald’s appointment as Ontario premier not only infuriated the Liberals but divided them.

  One other political matter needed to be sorted out. Back in London, the British had become convinced, for reasons difficult to comprehend, that when the new dominion was proclaimed officially, the document should include the names of all those who had won the ultimate Canadian lottery of appointment as senators—at that time a life appointment, unlike today’s unkind cutoff at the tender age of seventy-five.*180 Macdonald, looking ahead to the impending first election after Confederation, protested to Lord Carnarvon that “if the list were settled now, every man…who is omitted, rightly or wrongly, would vote against the Government.” The senatorial announcements were delayed until the fall, safely past the election’s date.

  The date for the Confederation celebrations was fixed for July 1. Macdonald would have preferred July 15, fearful that not all the preparations could be completed in time, but Monck insisted on the earlier date. He quietly passed the word to Macdonald that he was to receive a knighthood, as Knight Commander of the Bath; the lesser honour of the Companion of the Bath would be accorded to Cartier, Galt, Tupper and Tilley, as well as to “house broken” Reformers like McDougall and Howland. Of all the people on Monck’s list, the most conspicuous, by his absence, was George Brown, now back running the Globe and de facto leader of the Reform-Liberals. The list had been compiled on Macdonald’s recommendat
ions, and his choices showed him at his least gracious and most vengeful. A year later, Monck wrote to Brown apologizing with great grace: “I will confess to you that I was mortified and disappointed that circumstances rendered it impossible for me to recommend for a share in these distinctions the man whose conduct in 1864 had rendered the project of union feasible.”

  Two of the others, Galt and Cartier, protested strenuously that they too should have been awarded knighthoods. Cartier declined the lesser honour on the grounds that it was an insult to French Canadians for their leader not to have been put in the front rank. Galt similarly refused his reward, telling his wife, “It is an ingracious and most unusual thing to refuse an honour publicly conferred, but if Lord Monck is an ass, I cannot help it.” Galt, and several of the others, eventually received the knighthoods they sought while Cartier was appeased with the higher honour of baronecy, although Galt, always hypersensitive, accepted only after writing to the colonial secretary that he actually opposed all titles and believed instead that Canada should become independent from Britain.

  One story that went the rounds was that Macdonald learned from Monck only on Confederation Day itself of his own impending, solitary elevation to the knighthood. Very probably Macdonald was the source of this tale, letting it circulate in order to distance himself from blame for the hurt the incident had caused several of his cabinet colleagues. It’s easy to guess that the reason all of them learned of their rewards only at the very last moment was because Macdonald, foreseeing the outcome, had advised Monck to maintain secrecy to the end.

  With the Confederation bandwagon now at high speed, more and more people clambered aboard. In June, four of Quebec’s five bishops praised Confederation’s virtues in pastoral letters that were read for two Sundays from all the pulpits they commanded. Montreal bishop Ignace Bourget, at this time quarrelling with Cartier over his support of the liberal Sulpicians, delayed his pastoral letter until after July 1; in it he enjoined “l’obeissance à l’autorité constituée,” a formula that avoided any praise of Confederation.

  The most revealing pastoral letter was that of the bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe: he favoured Confederation, he told his flock, because “the fate awaiting us if God suffered us at some future date to enter the great American republic, would be exactly comparable to that of so many tributaries which have come to be swallowed up in the great St. Lawrence.” Cartier had made exactly the same point in his speech in the 1865 Confederation Debates: “The question is reduced to this: we must either have a British North American federation or else be absorbed into the American federation.” Canadiens had come to accept Confederation because, at the very least, it was better than the probably inevitable alternative of annexation, and at best could—just—prevent that national disappearance. If Macdonald understood this gut sense among French Canadians in a way that few other English-Canadian politicians then did, there was one obvious and decisive reason why: his own gut sense told him the same. Besides instinct, Macdonald by now possessed ample evidence of the United States’ mood of expansiveness, northwards.

  As Confederation approached, dramatic news came from Washington: the American government had just announced the takeover of a major piece of territory in North America. This territory was Alaska, whose Panhandle, stretching far southwards, cut off much of northern British Columbia from the sea. A steep purchase price of $7.2 million (U.S.) was agreed on between the territory’s owner, Russia, and the United States, and the treaty was signed by President Andrew Johnson on March 29—by coincidence the same day that Queen Victoria signed the British North America Act. The New York Herald praised the purchase as “a hint” to England that it had “no business on this continent.” The New York Tribune described it as “a flank movement” on British Columbia by surrounding “a hostile cockney with a watchful Yankee on either side of him.” About Confederation itself, the Tribune said, “When the experiment of the ‘dominion’ shall have failed, as fail it must, a process of peaceful absorption will give Canada her proper place in the great North American Republic.”

  Comments by circulation-chasing editors counted for relatively little. Quite different was the fact that the principal advocates of the Alaska purchase should have been the United States’ two well-known annexationists—Secretary of State William Seward and Senator Charles Sumner, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. On April 7, during Senate hearings on the Alaska purchase, Sumner described the takeover as “a visible step to the occupation of the whole North American continent.” Seward, in a speech in Boston on the eve of Confederation, said, “I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely the thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union.”

  At the same time, a U.S. agent in Canada, E.H. Derby, suggested in a report to Seward that Britain should be asked to cede its possessions in the far west—the then separate colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia—as payment for damages to the United States during the Civil War. This damage had been caused by Confederate raiders that had been built in and launched from British ports. From St. Paul, Minnesota, another agent, James W. Taylor, reported to Washington on the steady Americanization of the Red River region of Manitoba; he recommended that “events have presented to the people of the government of the United States the opportunity—let me rather say have developed the duty, of interposing an overture to the people of the English colonies…to unite their fortunes with the United States.”

  These were private communications, about which Macdonald could have no knowledge, although he would have known about the judgment of the Nor’Wester newspaper in Red River that “Americanism has become rampant with all classes, ages and conditions.” Other private communications, had he been aware of them, would have worried him a good deal more. They would have revealed that similar opinions existed in high places on the far side of the Atlantic. Early in 1867 the foreign secretary, Lord Stanley, wrote to the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Frederick Bruce, to say that Confederation had made Canada even more of a risk to Britain: “Many people would dislike the long boundary line with the United States (they look now to an early separation of Canada).” In March 1867 Stanley wrote again to Bruce: “The Colonies will remain Colonies, only confederated for the sake of convenience. If they choose to separate, we on this side shall not object; it is they who would protest against this idea. In England, separation would be generally popular.”

  Perhaps most disturbing of all to Macdonald, had he been aware of it, would have been the private comment by C.B. Adderley, the junior minister for the colonies, who had steered the British North America Act through the Commons: he told some of his colleagues, “It seems to me impossible that we should long hold B.C. from its natural annexation.” Nor were these views wholly private. The authoritative Times broadcast them by its editorial comment (read, regularly, not just by Canadian officials but no less so by American ones): “We look to Confederation as the means of relieving this country from much expense and much embarrassment.” And of Britain’s need to pull back its troops still stationed in Canada, the Times observed, accurately but embarrassingly, that these served only as “hostages…for British good behaviour.”

  An indication of just how seriously Macdonald took this mood is contained in a letter he wrote shortly before leaving England. Dated April 9, 1867, it was addressed to a prominent English lawyer, Henry Maine, who had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford at the same time as Macdonald the previous June. “I sail in four days for Canada with the act uniting all British America in my pocket,” he wrote. “A brilliant future would certainly await us were it not for those wretched Yankees who hunger & thirst for Naboth’s field—War will come some day between England & the United States.”

  In facing this challenge, Macdonald could really count on only one influential political ally who thought as he did. Unexpectedly, that was Galt, highly intelligent but highly volatile too. (There was also the passionate nationalist McGe
e, except that his political career was now in steep decline because of his insensate drinking.) Back in January 1867, Galt, while still in London and working to get the BNA Act through Westminster, wrote a letter to his wife that indicates a great deal about the threat to Canada from the east as well as the south, or from Britain as well as the United States—at least as that threat was perceived. Galt’s letter reveals also an exceptional appreciation of Macdonald’s determination to stand on guard for the Canada that was about to be born.

  “I am more than ever disappointed at the tone of feeling here as to the colonies. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that they want to get rid of us…and would rather give us up than defend us, or incur the risk of war with that country. Day by day I am more oppressed with the sense of responsibility of maintaining a connection undesired here, and which exposes us to such peril at home. I pray God to show me the right path. But I much doubt whether Confederation will save us from Annexation. Even Macdonald is rapidly feeling as I do.” He continued, “Except Macdonald, I know none of the Delegates who really think enough of the future that is before us, and he considers that our present immediate task is to complete the Union, leaving the rest to be solved by time.”