1867
Page 20
Women were also beginning to crack open some of the formal prohibitions on their participation in public life. A few were already going to university and pushing for access to medical schools and professional careers. Emily Stowe, a Canadian trained in the United States, opened a medical practice in Toronto in the year of confederation. A decade later Dr. Stowe would help organize the first Canadian campaigns for woman suffrage. Though women would be denied the vote until the end of the First World War, women’s-rights campaigners would force the generation of politicians empowered by confederation to debate (and vote down) woman suffrage regularly.
Suffragists demanded the vote as a right rooted in the equality of men and women. Men frequently justified male suffrage as providing a “household franchise,” exercised by the (male) head of the household. They argued that wives and daughters deserved the vote no more than hired men or sons who deferred to the authority of the master of the house. There was no justice in giving women the vote, they argued, if that simply gave their husbands or fathers control of extra votes. Women might argue about confederation – and what roles they may have played in influencing the choices their husbands and fathers made remains largely unstudied. But they could not vote.
One reason to deny women the vote was what George Brown celebrated as “the manly British system of open voting.” Until the 1870s, nearly all British North Americans had to vote in public. Brown’s adjective “manly” was carefully chosen, for the tumult and violence that often accompanied “open” voting helped justify the exclusion of women. Even more important was the belief that it was manliness which required a public statement of one’s political convictions. Voting and manliness went together, and advocates of open voting argued that no man who demanded a share of civic responsibility should refuse to declare his allegiance publicly. Only cowardly men would hide in a ballot booth. Advocates of the secret ballot argued that open voting encouraged vote-buying, but their rivals retorted that the secret ballot sacrificed “moral control” of voting; it actually encouraged corrupt behaviour by those who would say one thing and do another.
Open voting prevailed in most of British North America until a decade after confederation, but not in New Brunswick. Leonard Tilley had been in the government that had introduced voting by ballot there in the 1850s. In New Brunswick’s confederation elections, voters wrote the name of their chosen candidate on a slip of paper and delivered it to the electoral officer. The full secret-ballot system, with printed ballots, screened voting booths, and other controls, was introduced to the world by South Australia in 1856, but New Brunswick had already accepted the essence of the process.*
Campaigning in mid-nineteenth-century British North America was direct and personal. Given the independent authority of individual members, voters had reason to assess the man as closely as the party with which he was associated. With only a thousand voters in many constituencies, an experienced local member would know most of his supporters personally, and most of his opposition, too. Long, careful cultivation of personal and communal loyalties was vital. If that did not seem to be succeeding, then persuasion, coercion, and intimidation came into play. The task of a constituency team was to get supporters to the polls, and also to keep opponents away. Early Canadian electoral folklore is filled with doctored voters’ lists, reports of “treating” the voters, intimidation, and discussions of the price of a vote. It was a rough-and-ready process.
Honest elections depended on each individual’s will or ability to reject coercion and stand by his principles. (That is, George Brown might have said, elections depended on the “manliness” of each voter.) It was because individual votes were crucially important that corruption lurked around every polling station. In the late twentieth century, skewing the vote had become almost entirely a wholesale process, where media buys, spin campaigns, and the well-timed release of tailored surveys were the best ways to influence national campaigns. In the 1860s, voting was personal, and the economics of political corruption were still retail. If the parties were equally corrupt and equally funded, corruption might cancel itself out, but it was never eliminated.
In New Brunswick’s 1865 election, “confederation or no confederation” was the overwhelming issue. Tilley, Gray, and other confederation supporters held several big meetings in Saint John in November. Soon Tilley was out on a “stumping expedition through the central counties,” and arranging meetings across the province. Unfortunately for Tilley, the “strong current running against federation” that he had observed in November grew stronger as the campaign progressed. Tilley was popular and persuasive enough that anti-confederate leaders refused to debate him, and he had all the machinery and funds of government with which to tempt the voters. In mid-campaign, he believed he was “making good headway against the suspicions and fears of our opponents.” In fact, confederation was making very little headway at all.10
Confederation was not an urgent necessity in New Brunswick. None of the Maritime provinces faced the political crisis that drove the Canadians to seek a new arrangement, and the Quebec resolutions were a very “Canadian” proposal – from the “oily brains of Canadian politicians,” said Albert Smith.11 Maritimers had experienced years of frustrated bickering with the Canadians on many issues, and felt no incentive to solve Canadian problems. Confederation, with its promise to reorganize all the familiar political identities and commercial ties of each of the colonies, had come up suddenly in the Maritimes, offering little but the sheer ambition of the thing as an incentive.
Confederation’s weakness was compounded by a host of local irritants. Tilley’s government, in office a long time, had lost supporters on a series of controversies even before confederation emerged. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant who had never cultivated Catholic votes effectively, had recruited no Catholics to the Charlottetown and Quebec delegations, and the Acadian and Irish-Catholic minorities of the province regarded both him and confederation warily. Saint John merchants and shippers, normally allies of Tilley, feared new tariffs and fiercer competition (with good reason), and argued that maintaining both federal and provincial governments would require increased taxation. Smith and his allies campaigned against both the details and the consequences of the Quebec resolutions. “Do you wish Canada oats, beef, pork, butter, etc., to come into this country at one half the price you are now receiving? Do you wish the whole revenue of this country to be handed over to … the dishonest statesmen of Canada?” Every issue seemed to go against Tilley and confederation.12
When the results of the New Brunswick election were complete, early in March 1865, only eleven declared supporters of the Quebec resolutions survived in a house of forty-one members, and Albert Smith took over as premier. “We have been pounded, really pounded,” wrote John Gray as the results came in. “I could not believe that the constituency which I have represented for fifteen years could have embraced so many fools or could have been so thoroughly blind to its own interest.”13
Gray had grounds to be bitter, perhaps; he had lost his seat. So had Tilley, but Tilley was remarkably unperturbed. In late-twentieth-century terms, the election should have given Albert Smith an unshakeable “mandate” for four or five years, but in the 1860s parliamentary democracy never put a legislature in such a straitjacket. Tilley had already calculated that Smith’s collection of reformers and conservatives would be hard-pressed to find an alternative to confederation – or to agree on anything else. Already, he was guessing that putting Smith into office might turn out to be the best way to expose his weaknesses and wean away his backbench supporters. “All our friends are plucky, sanguine of early success, and intend fighting earnestly for a reversal,” said Tilley within weeks of his electoral defeat. He calmly foresaw that “the day is not far distant when a majority of the electors of this province will declare in favour of a federal union.”14
In the Canadian legislature, then in the midst of its confederation debate, the rouges and other opponents of confederation used the New Brunswick results
to argue that confederation should simply be abandoned, since it was now dead in the Maritimes (the Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland legislatures had already refused to proceed with the Quebec resolutions). Instead, Macdonald moved to force an immediate vote on the Quebec resolutions. Canadian backbenchers were as free as those in New Brunswick to abandon the government if they judged it wise to do so, but the coalition leaders were confident that their members still supported them and the confederation plan. Indeed, the Canadian legislature seemed undaunted by the New Brunswick results. Its members closed the debate and approved the Quebec resolutions with a nearly three-to-one majority.
There was no such confidence in Nova Scotia. Charles Tupper had returned from Quebec full of his usual confident bluster. He had always declared that the legislature was the appropriate place for the Quebec resolutions to be ratified or rejected. Since the legislature included a large majority of his supporters, and since the opposition leaders were also with him, he foresaw no elections. He seems to have expected to have the Quebec resolutions quickly ratified.
Instead, Tupper encountered the same surging resistance as Tilley. Nova Scotia felt no more urgent spur towards constitutional change than New Brunswick, and many of its commercial and political leaders were horrified by the terms Tupper had accepted at Quebec. Albert Gilpin Jones, who had organized Tupper’s electoral triumph eighteen months earlier, denounced him and called the financial terms a disaster for the province. Thomas Coffin of Shelburne, Thomas Killam of Yarmouth, and Archibald McLelan of Minas – all sailors and shipbuilders, and all members of the legislature – spoke out for the province’s powerful shipping and trading interests. “Nova Scotia had more ships in the port of Calcutta in any day of the year than … in all the ports of Canada,” McLelan said scornfully, but Canadian tariffs would force Nova Scotia to abandon its free-ranging, low-tariff sea trades.15 Halifax merchant banker William Stairs predicted high taxes and high tariffs to subsidize costly Canadian experiments with railways, industrial development, and westward expansion.
Hearing such arguments, Jonathan McCully fumed about the conservatism of the rich. He accused those who had “money made” of blocking the ambitions of those who were seeking new opportunities. But that kind of counter-attack only seemed to confirm that confederation would force radical economic change upon the province. In fact, Tupper, who had gone to Quebec with four lawyers and no businessmen, had accepted financial arrangements that would make it difficult for Nova Scotia to avoid rapid bankruptcy if it joined the union. Confederation’s critics savaged these terms, and even would-be unionists declared them impossible to swallow.
Not all objections came from the pocketbook. A potent mix of quasi-national pride and Imperial loyalty led many Nova Scotians to fear that confederation would make their province a very junior partner in a new and unwelcome nationality. The old, established province, once the richest of the British North American colonies, still saw itself as the senior colony, the most cultured and best endowed with higher learning. In its newspapers and meeting places, the public men of the province launched a searching critique of the Quebec resolutions, and, by the end of 1864, a consensus against confederation seemed to have formed. Joseph Howe thrilled with pride. “People were told that opposition would be vain,” he wrote. “They had to study the measure, to look for leaders, to cast off the trammels of party, to form new combinations and to defend their institutions from this sudden surprise as they best could. Nothing illustrates more finely the high spirit and intellectual resources of Nova Scotia than the rapidity with which all this was done.”16
Howe had come late to Nova Scotia’s confederation debate. The ex-premier and elder statesman had been busy with his duties on the Imperial fisheries inquiry, and at first Nova Scotian opposition to confederation blossomed without him. But he was only sixty, as assertive as ever, and sure that he understood Nova Scotia and its needs more deeply than anyone. He had often looked forward to uniting the British colonies of North America, but the Quebec resolutions and their strongly “Canadian” emphasis appalled him. From the beginning of 1865, Howe strengthened the anti-confederate cause with his prestige and his phrase-making.
Howe made confederation a question of the rights of Nova Scotians. Responsible government had been his great achievement, and he reminded Nova Scotians of “the great battle by which the appointment of our own officers, the control of our own revenues, the management of our own affairs, was secured to Nova Scotians.” Howe denounced the Quebec resolutions as a scheme to transfer those precious rights to a government answerable to Upper and Lower Canadians, not Nova Scotians. “This crazy confederacy” was not merely misguided, he said, it was illegitimate. It was unconstitutional.17
As resistance to the Quebec plan swept the province, Tupper’s comfortable legislative majority crumbled. One of his cabinet ministers, John McKinnon of Antigonish, resigned rather than endorse the Quebec resolutions. Even Robert Dickey, government leader in the upper house and a delegate to both Charlottetown and Quebec, declared his lack of enthusiasm for the terms. Opposition leaders Archibald and McCully never wavered in their support for the Quebec agreement – they “stood by me like trumps,” said Tupper rather possessively – but most of the reform caucus renounced them. They dumped Archibald from his position as party leader and leader of the opposition and chose William Annand in his place.18
Annand was Howe’s most devoted admirer, nicknamed “Boots” for his devotion, and the editor of Howe’s collected works. A journalist by profession, he had made fellow reformer Jonathan McCully editor of his influential newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. Since Charlottetown, McCully had made the Chronicle a strong voice for confederation. But McCully was only the editor. Annand owned the paper. As soon as Annand committed himself to the anti-confederate cause, he fired McCully, and the Chronicle began to publish Howe’s rush of anti-confederate fury, the “Botheration Letters.” McCully scrambled to start a new newspaper, the Unionist.
In the first days of 1865, Tupper still claimed to believe the Nova Scotia legislature might endorse the Quebec resolutions when it met in February. “I hope we will carry the day,” he wrote to John A. Macdonald. But when Tilley called the election in New Brunswick and went plunging toward defeat, he took the prospects for ratification in Nova Scotia down with him. “Had he waited,” Tupper complained to Macdonald, “by great sacrifices and exertions, we could, I think, have secured a bare majority.” After the collapse of confederation in New Brunswick, however, the Nova Scotia members would not annoy their constituents in a pointless gesture. “A number here who might have been disposed to sacrifice their own position to achieve an important object would not be willing to do so without any practical result to be attained,” Tupper told Lieutenant-Governor Richard MacDonell mournfully.19
Thwarted in the New Brunswick assembly, Tilley had faced a general election. Thwarted in the Nova Scotia assembly, Tupper preferred the strategy of delay. Since Nova Scotia’s assembly could not be persuaded to vote in favour of the Quebec plan, Tupper encouraged it not to vote on it at all. Annand and Howe were endorsing the old dream of rebuilding greater Nova Scotia through Maritime union, so Tupper indulged them. Declaring blandly that “immediate” action on the larger Quebec plan had become “impracticable,” he persuaded the legislature to renew negotiations for a union with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. When, as he fully expected, Prince Edward Island dismissed the idea as flatly as it had at Charlottetown, the anti-confederates’ claim to have a feasible alternative to confederation was neatly skewered. Almost the entire debate on his “Maritime union” resolution had focused on confederation, but Tupper had avoided a negative vote on it.20
For the rest of 1865, Tupper avoided asking the legislature or the electorate to decide on confederation. Tupper insisted it was all up to the legislature. “If the people’s representatives are satisfied that the country is opposed to this union, they can reject it, or they can obtain a dissolution by asking for it,” he said, promi
sing that the government would “leave its decision to the independent action of the legislature.” But the opponents and doubters also shrank from forcing the issue. Even when by-elections swelled the anti-confederate ranks, they allowed Tupper to pursue his policy of delay. The Quebec resolutions lay on the table, neither endorsed nor rejected, and Tupper remained in power. His optimism revived. “Twelve months will, I believe, find a decided majority in the present parliament in favour of confederation,” he declared in April 1865, and he was prepared to wait.21
At first, delay seemed most likely to compound Tupper’s problems. With confederation blocked, perhaps permanently, in the Maritimes, some Upper Canadian reformers began to urge the achievement of their goal, rep-by-pop, by federating Upper and Lower Canada alone. The coalition held to its commitment to the larger plan, but Upper Canada was unlikely to wait forever for rep-by-pop, when three Maritime provinces were on record against the union proposed at Quebec. Then Leonard Tilley’s prediction began to come true.
During 1865, Tilley’s decision to go to the people, even at the price of being driven from office, began to seem brilliant. By throwing confederation’s critics into office, New Brunswick had made them display how unprepared they were, and their alternatives to confederation began to seem threadbare and incoherent. Albert Smith and George Hatheway (who after abandoning Tilley’s cabinet had joined Smith’s) held views not far removed from those of Hector Langevin or Oliver Mowat. They suspected the Quebec terms because they feared the rights of the provinces had been inadequately secured against federal interference. But Robert Wilmot, Smith’s government leader in the upper house, and his attorney-general, John Allen, opposed the Quebec resolutions for the opposite reason. Closer to John A. Macdonald than to their own leader, Wilmot and Allen spoke for a faction that feared the Quebec terms had not given the central government enough strength to hold the new nation together. The fiery Saint John journalist Timothy Anglin, meanwhile, had delivered much of the Irish-Catholic vote to the anti-confederate cause and could not be denied a cabinet seat, despite the discomfort he caused to patrician Anglicans like Wilmot.