The Charlottetown conference gave a uniquely carnivalesque air to the sober world of Canadian political history. George Brown, sailing to Charlottetown with the Canadian delegation, rose at four for a saltwater shower and saw dawn revealing the rich green shores of Prince Edward Island, “as pretty a country as you could ever put your eye upon.” Everyone going to Charlottetown seems to have been similarly inspired. The charms of the Island and the glorious high summer weather that prevailed throughout the conference soon enveloped all the potentially quarrelsome participants in a festive, party mood.13
No one has evoked this mood better than Peter Waite. Waite’s 1962 book The Life and Times of Confederation was the first of the great 1960s histories of confederation to appear; its opening sentence notes that no book had been published on the subject since 1924. When he researched The Life and Times, Waite was determined that its themes would grow out of the “raucous voices” of the “vast and multifarious native sources” in the newspapers of the time. Later, he would describe himself as “driven to the newspapers, to the Parliamentary Library, to the St. John’s library, to the hot little sheds on Pinnacle Street, Belleville, Ont., not by the exigencies of a Ph.D. but by adrenalin.” He was caught, he said, “as the newspapermen of the time were, by the sheer magnitude of confederation, of colonials meeting and greeting for the first time, a bit star-struck some of them, the way the writer was, who’d caught it too.” 14
Waite’s quarryings from those newspapers yielded the details of the Charlottetown conference that historians have relied on ever since. Charlottetown in 1864 was a town of just seven thousand people, with red dirt streets running in parallel lines down to the spacious, sheltered harbour. Its landmark was Province House, the Georgian legislative building built with Island stone and Island craftsmanship in 1847, and still central in the modern city of Charlottetown.
In late August 1864, Waite tells us, the great excitement in the town was caused not by the hastily scheduled political conference, but by Slaymaker’s and Nichol’s Olympic Circus, the first circus seen on the Island in twenty years. Charlottetown’s twenty small hotels were crowded with excursion visitors drawn by this sensation. As one of the newspapers noted, even Island politicians could not be deprived of their chance to see the elephants, and in his book Waite has fun with the casual reception given to the arriving delegations. When the spit-and-polish steamship Queen Victoria, carrying the Canadian delegation, the last to arrive, anchored in the harbour on September 1, the Island’s provincial secretary William Pope had to have himself rowed out to her in an oyster boat “with a barrel of flour in the bow and two jars of molasses in the stern.” Once Pope had welcomed the visitors, the Queen Victoria’s boats were lowered, “man-of-war” fashion. In Brown’s amused phrase, “we landed like Mr Christopher Columbus, who had the precedence of us in taking possession of portions of the American continent.”15
That same day, the conference opened in Province House. For all its giddy improvisation and champagne-fuelled sociability, the delegates to the Charlottetown conference also spent quite a few hours grinding out constitutional details around a conference table – more hours, in fact, than late-twentieth-century first ministers usually devoted to constitutional accords. Today, half-legislature and halfmuseum, Province House still preserves that serious side. Visitors to “the Confederation Room,” which in 1864 was the chamber where the Island’s upper house met, still lean over the barrier to see the long table and leather chairs where the business of the conference was conducted.
The Charlottetown conference began with its original mandate of Maritime union, and no Canadians. The Maritimers, veterans of parliamentary business, set about electing Colonel Gray, their host, as chairman, and the visiting premiers, Tupper and Tilley, as joint secretaries, and hearing the enabling resolutions from their three legislatures. Despite some dissent, they soon decided they would have no observers and no transcripts. “Buncombe speeches will be out of place, and politicians will for once deal with naked facts,” wrote a surprisingly sympathetic journalist. While no transcript was made, the shape of the discussions was soon widely known and widely reported.16
Having organized the formalities, the Maritimers decided almost at once to bring in the Canadians and hear their proposal. Charlottetown thereupon became two conferences proceeding in tandem – the Maritimers’ sessions on Maritime union, interspersed with much longer meetings to discuss confederation with the Canadian guests. The Charlottetown conference would continue all week, and the delegates would hold further sessions in Halifax and Saint John before adjourning the Charlottetown conference indefinitely (in fact, permanently) in Montreal in October. The vital sessions, however, were those with the Canadians in the upstairs room at Charlottetown.
With the entry of the Canadians, Maritime union was effectively marginalized. Begun as a whim of Arthur Gordon, it was not a vital interest of any of the three governments. None of them had done the preparatory planning the governors might have ordered had they retained control. Gordon, who disapproved of both the confederation idea and the representative form the conference had taken, spent only a couple of days at Charlottetown before returning to Fredericton to draft a scathing report for his masters in London. The elected politicians of the Maritimes, however, were eager to learn more of the larger union before making any decision on the smaller one. So the Canadians, straight from the boat and many of them quite unknown to their Maritime colleagues, were ushered in for what Brown called “the shake elbow and the how-d’ye-do and the fine weather.” Charlottetown had been permanently redirected.
For the next three business days, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, September 2, 3, and 5, the Canadians led the conference through a long presentation on the ways and means of a federal union of British North America. They had done their homework. George Brown, Alexander Galt, and others in the Canadian delegation had been thinking hard about such a union for half a decade, and the parliamentary committee led by Brown had given the concept a rigorous examination in May and June 1864. After the Brown–Cartier–Macdonald coalition was formed in June, federal union had dominated the Canadian cabinet’s agenda, and the last-minute opportunity to join the Maritimers at Charlottetown had provoked furious preparation of position papers and background documents. The Canadians’ scripts were ready, and they knew their lines.
John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier introduced the confederation proposal. Macdonald spoke more than Cartier, who to the end of his life was never entirely comfortable speaking formally in English. “Federalism” was a large part of Macdonald’s presentation. A federal union, one that divided power between central and provincial governments, was the basis on which the Canadian coalition had formed, and any proposal that did not guarantee the survival of local legislatures would be hard to sell in the Maritime provinces. But federalism provoked doubts, too. None of the colonials had ever lived under a federal regime. The United Kingdom, to which they all looked, was a unitary state, not a federal union, and the collapse of the United States into secession and civil war was no recommendation for the federal principle. Macdonald, both an instinctive centralizer and an adroit politician, must have spent much of the day threading his way between the centralized authority he would have preferred and the local autonomy he had to accept, eagerly seizing any hint of what leeway the delegates would tolerate.
The next day was devoted to Alexander Galt’s exposition on the finances of a federal union. Galt also inclined to a strong central government, and his presentation may have begun to bring home to the Maritimers just how much power the Canadians expected the national government to wield in confederation. Big, energetic, dogmatic George Brown took all of the third day to outline the Canadians’ proposals on constitutional mechanics: the divisions of powers, the relations of the provinces to the central government, the harmonization of laws, the judiciary. Back in 1859, at the great reform convention in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, Brown had sold federal union to the restive, separatist-mind
ed delegates by describing its central government merely as “some joint authority” between powerful provinces. Memories of that stand, and of Brown’s long fight to free Canada West from the union, may have reassured local patriots that their provincial prerogatives would endure. But by 1864 Brown’s views on federalism were changing. He too foresaw a central government with broad powers, and he would soon be describing the provinces as “mere municipal institutions.”17
After three days of detailed proposals, the next day, not surprisingly, was for questions, answers, and discussion. Hector Langevin of the bleus, D’Arcy McGee, and the old Clear Grit reformer William McDougall gave speeches, perhaps to suggest all-party support for the leaders’ views within the Canadian delegation. But the Maritimers also probed and tested the broad concept. Setting out their concerns and interests, they gave the Canadians a sense of where to push hard, where to pull back.
Only on the sixth day, Wednesday, September 7, did the Maritimers hold a substantial session on Maritime union, the formal business their legislatures had authorized them to discuss. The return to formal session required a resolution to drive the business, and Tupper moved Charlottetown’s first substantial motion: “Whereas in the opinion of this conference a Union of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island under one government and legislature would elevate the status, enhance the credit, enlarge the influence, improve the social, commercial, and political condition, increase the development, and promote the interests generally of all these provinces, RESOLVED that the time has arrived when such Union should be effected.”18
For all the confidence of the preamble, this was a resolution of principle only. Tupper, who would have been happy to see its passage as a first step in the rebuilding of greater Nova Scotia, spoke forcefully of the benefits of union. But he had no details comparable to those the Canadians had been providing about the federal union, no suggestions for where the capital of a united Maritime province would be, nothing to say how distinct (and politically explosive) schools systems would be integrated, nothing about how the delicate ethnic, religious, and class coalitions of each province would be reordered in a united province.
Tupper’s notes confirm that debate on his motion quickly exposed deep divisions amongst the delegations. The tactless suggestion of New Brunswick attorney-general Johnson that it would be good for Prince Edward Island to become “a partner in the land of New Brunswick” invited retaliation. Colonel Gray soon replied that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were already as good as united, but the disadvantages to the Island would be great. Edward Palmer reminded the room that the Islanders were there only to listen. Their legislature, he said coldly, had given them no authority to endorse a union – or even to express an opinion. Chandler, the loyalist aristocrat from New Brunswick, perhaps offended by Colonel Gray’s dismissal of his province’s individuality and aware that Halifax was the most likely capital of a united Maritimes, noted that New Brunswick was going to have difficulty with the seat-of-government problem.
The more these issues loomed, the more eagerly the Maritimers brought confederation back into the Maritime-union debate. The Canadians were eager to see the Maritimes become one province, suggested Tilley darkly, because Canada might have to offer better terms to the three provinces separately than to one united province. William Pope of Prince Edward Island took the same view. George Coles said eagerly that a federal government would have the authority – and the money – to settle the Island’s vexed problem of absentee estates, a tempting carrot for the Islanders. (Indeed, withdrawal of this carrot would make Coles a vigorous anti-confederate who would help keep Prince Edward Island out of confederation in 1867.)
Finally, Leonard Tilley voiced a gathering consensus about Maritime union and confederation. Confederation seemed possible, he said, but Maritime union would not help confederation and, given its difficulties, would probably delay it. “If we get the confederation now,” Tilley said breezily, “we could easily unite the Maritime provinces … afterwards.” If we want to, some of his audience perhaps added silently.
With that settled, Maritime union was disposed of as a serious alternative. The Maritimers adjourned their discussion of Tupper’s motion and invited the Canadians back in. Brown summed up in a phrase. “The conference gave the Canadian delegates their answer – that they were unanimous in regarding federation of all the provinces to be highly desirable, if the terms of union could be made satisfactory – and that they were prepared to waive their own more limited question until the details of our scheme could be more fully considered and matured.”19
The delegates took the next day off. Though there would be further sessions, that agreement on Wednesday, September 7, marked the effective end of the Charlottetown conference. Simultaneously, it had launched the Quebec conference. Maritime union had been shelved; substantive discussions of the terms of a federal union were now required. The Canadians had already planned to invite the Maritimers to Quebec if the Charlottetown sessions succeeded, and within a few weeks new delegations were being appointed to gather there on October 10.
Charlottetown had done more than dispose of Maritime union, however. The conference had endorsed the principle of a federal union of the British North American provinces – a union in which the central government would be supreme, but in which local legislatures would retain significant powers. This was the principle of the British North America Act in a nutshell. This was Canada in a nutshell, in fact.
Not all, or even half, of that agreement had been achieved at the conference table in what is now the Confederation Room at Province House. Around the business sessions developed an extraordinary social whirl. The politicians of the united Canadas and those of the Maritime provinces hardly knew each other, and their occasional previous dealings had most often led to acrimonious failure. On the delicate and momentous matters that had come to dominate the Charlottetown conference, they needed to sound out each other’s sense of what was essential and what was unacceptable, what each might offer and what each would demand. For the business to succeed, they needed to know something about each other, and that was where Charlottetown had its great and memorable success.
Charlottetown hospitality was constant and exhausting. The first night, the Island’s lieutenant-governor held a lavish dinner at his waterfront residence. The next day, after the conference adjourned at three, William Pope invited delegates to his home for an elaborate “luncheon” of Island delicacies: oysters, lobsters, and champagne. “This killed the day,” reported George Brown, “and we spent the beautiful moonlight evening in walking, driving, or boating, as the mood was on us.”20
The social calendar remained crowded for the rest of the week, even as the business sessions ground through their agenda. After Galt’s financial presentation, a late lunch aboard the Queen Victoria was followed by a grand dinner at Colonel Gray’s country estate, “Inkerman.” On the Monday, George Coles, the Island opposition leader, gave his luncheon. Next day, it was the turn of Edward Palmer to offer the late luncheon. That night Lieutenant-Governor George Dundas and his wife hosted a grand ball at Government House – “a very nice affair, but a great bore for old fellows like me,” wrote Brown to his wife, Anne, who was visiting Scotland. On the following days, there would be another reception aboard the Queen Victoria, excursions to the country and the north-shore beaches, and yet another ball at Province House.
For Peter Waite, “the beginning of confederation” could be precisely dated. It happened when the Canadians began pouring from their plentiful stores of champagne aboard the Queen Victoria on Saturday, September 3, after the second day of their presentation. They were celebrating, he wrote, “the heady discovery of a national destiny.” Waite had Brown’s evidence to back up his claim. “Cartier and I made eloquent speeches,” said Brown about that shipboard party, “and whether as the result of our eloquence or of the goodness of our champagne, the ice became completely broken, the tongues of the delegates wagged merrily, and the banns of matrimony b
etween all the provinces of BNA having been formally proclaimed … the union was formally proclaimed and completed.” Champagne flowed like water, commented Waite, “and union talk with it. The occasion took hold of everyone. Champagne and union.… Here was a metamorphosis indeed: this transformation of the dross of reality into the gold of personal conviction.”21
Champagne and union inspired a lot of cynical comment, to the effect that confederation was made when a conspiracy of politicians got drunk together at the public expense. But confederation at Charlottetown had two requirements. Men who had good reason to consider themselves legitimate representatives of the electorates of five future provinces had to be persuaded that confederation was both worthy and feasible. In the business sessions, the politicians confronted serious issues and fundamental principles. In the sunshine and the dinners and the country excursions, they established the trust that helped the business sessions go forward. Charlottetown’s social sessions and business sessions worked in tandem.
At the closing ball, the most lavish yet, the delegates tried blending business and sociability. George Brown heard that at 2:00 a.m, after the dancing and the dinner, “the Goths commenced speech-making and actually kept it up for two hours and three-quarters, the poor girls being condemned to listen to it all.” Brown himself had gone to bed early and avoided such horrors. The next morning, as the delegations left for Halifax, one newspaper correspondent noted that most of the statesmen were as befogged as the harbour.22
Charles Tupper was surely there to the end, and his attention to the poor girls, though unrecorded, may well have been more assiduous than Brown’s. Charlottetown had been a triumph for Tupper. As the leader of the largest Maritime province and the most bullish enthusiast among them, both for Maritime union and for confederation, he was crucial in forging Atlantic Canada’s welcome to the Canadian proposal. John A. Macdonald told Joseph Pope, his official biographer, that he had concluded on the first day of Charlottetown that Tupper was exactly the man needed for the accomplishment of confederation. While this smacks of Macdonaldian bonhomie, it strikes the right note about Tupper’s influence at Charlottetown, and the two men did forge a political alliance that lasted almost thirty more years. In time, their sons would become law partners and cabinet colleagues. Tupper was enamoured of big opportunities and had the personality to dominate most gatherings. Charlottetown must have been glory to him.
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