Miss Confederation

by Anne McDonald

  ** The statue is still there.

  *** Mercy is referring to her sisters Louisa and Mary Victoria, twenty and seventeen years old respectively, and Georgianna, twenty-two years old, and married a year already. The boys are her brothers, Russell and Charlie, nine and five years old.

  **** These are the words, but it’s not at all clear what Mercy means.

  ***** Does she mean D’Arcy McGee?

  ****** The hotel name looks the same as the name of the hotel the Coles are staying at.

  ******* Mercy’s sister, twenty-four years old, and about to be married in December.

  ******** Then there is a short line at the bottom of the page that is too faint to read. Too bad, as it may have provided a little more insight into Mercy’s feelings about Leonard Tilley.

  ******** They would have been travelling on the train, using the free pass Leonard Tilley had left them at the hotel.

  ******** James Duncan was a shipbuilder; John Yeo was a Conservative in the PEI legislature, son of shipbuilder James Yeo; and Lewis Carvell was the younger brother of businessman Jedediah Slason Carvell.

  ******** They were at the Stubbs Hotel, in Saint John. One wonders which version of the “Bonnie Blue Flag” they sang. If Mr. Solomon were a Confederate, he wouldn’t be singing the Union version, nor does it seem likely Mercy would be singing the Confederate version.

  Fourteen

  Confederation Suitors

  And what of Mercy’s Confederation suitors? Why weren’t any of the possible matches successful? What became of them, and why didn’t things work out?

  Whether John A. Macdonald was only paying attention to Mercy for political expediency can’t be known. He definitely did disappear, either into drink or because he was ill, at the end of the Quebec conference and for the tour of Canada. He went to Toronto, but didn’t appear at any of the functions or meetings. He wrote later that he’d been ill. He did go back to Prince Edward Island in later years, with Agnes. In 1917, Mercy says that he’d “always proved a very kind friend” to her. But how likely would it have been that Macdonald would have seriously considered Mercy as a mate when she’d been away, deathly sick, for two weeks of the conference? After suffering through the long, long illnesses of his first wife, Isabella, how much would he, or could he, really let himself fall for someone who was so sick? At 138 pounds, Mercy was no waif like Isabella, but she may have appeared too young, too fragile for Macdonald to consider her as a potential mate. And, of course, George Coles’s decided turn against Confederation wouldn’t have helped Mercy’s case, either.

  Macdonald married Agnes Bernard in February 1867. They had one daughter in 1869, Mary, who was born with hydrocephalus. Her father doted on her, and she ended up living until 1933, a fairly long life for a person in her circumstances. Agnes, who was thirty-one when she married the fifty-two-year-old John A., outlived him by twenty-nine years.

  That nothing progressed between Mercy and another Maritimer like herself, Leonard Tilley, is perhaps saddest of all. He had seemed genuinely interested in Mercy Coles, and she in him, not that she spoke as gaily of him as she did of Macdonald, or as flirtatiously as she did of Hewitt Bernard. In the main, she spoke of him in a way that made him sound like a viable prospect. Tilley did go on to remarry, in 1867; a young woman, not a mature forty-year-old like Mrs. Alexander. So, Mercy, at twenty-six years, would have been a much more likely contender for Leonard Tilley’s affections than Mrs. Alexander. Alice Starr Chipman was only twenty-three years old when she married Tilley, and was the daughter of a friend of his. He went on to have two more children with her, and they lived a seemingly happy life together. Tilley lived till he was seventy-eight, and died June 25, 1896, of blood poisoning from a cut he’d gotten on his foot. There is no record of further connection between Mercy Coles and Leonard Tilley after the Confederation conferences, aside from the information in the Guardian that says Mercy maintained a friendship with him, as well as with “several other personages … distinguished in the history of Canada.”

  Again, though, politics likely influenced Tilley’s ideas of who an appropriate mate might be. Tilley was pro-Confederation, and went to the polls only four months after the Quebec conference. He lost that election, and even lost his own seat. It would hardly have been the time to be courting the daughter (or sister, in the case of Mrs. Alexander) of the men now so set against Confederation as George Coles or Thomas Haviland were.

  Hewitt Bernard, the secretary of the conference, appeared to be another serious contender as a suitor for Mercy. He also had the potential to be less affected by political motives, as he was not voting on the resolutions, nor representing any political party. As well, at thirty-nine, he was the youngest of these three possible suitors. Mercy writes of Hewitt Bernard having gout: “He looks awful. I tease him about it, it is a great shame but I can’t help it.” The relationship could be seen as flirtatious and intimate, or brotherly, but it seems more of a flirtatious nature, especially since she starts off her journal saying, “Major Bernard tells me we are to have good times.… The first word almost he said was, ‘I hope you brought the irresistible blue silk.’” Mercy is taken with the time, looking forward to events, and definitely enjoying the compliments and attention. All through the weeks of the conference and tour, she writes of how Hewitt Bernard calls on her every day. She’s dis-appointed when he comes to dinner with her family but she is away sick. And she can’t stop herself from teasing him.

  Hewitt Bernard in 1862.

  Hewitt Bernard never married, either. He lived in Ottawa, once it was declared the capital, even though he disliked it intensely, calling it a “hot, dusty, fifth rate little Peddlington.” Once John A. Macdonald and Bernard’s sister, Agnes, were married in 1867, he lived with them in Ottawa. He was the deputy judge advocate general of Canada West, and then became Canada’s first deputy minister of justice in 1867. His plate was full with the work his position entailed. And the gout he had during the conference plagued him his whole life. He probably had rheumatoid arthritis; it eventually crippled him. He had to resign by the time he was fifty-one, in 1876, and ended up an invalid. In the winter, he took to living in a sanatorium in New Jersey. When Hewitt visited with the Macdonalds, Agnes would go for walks with her brother, Hewitt, in one wheelchair and her daughter, Mary, in another. Hewitt Bernard died in 1893, at sixty-eight years of age: no doubt his rheumatoid arthritis shortened his life.

  Charles Drinkwater, John A. Macdonald’s private secretary, also called on Mercy every day when she was ill. He brought her a bouquet for the first event. But Drinkwater was only twenty-one years old. Still, it was common enough then for women to marry men close to their own age, though he was five years younger than Mercy. He would have been well enough off with his position. In his photograph, taken by William Notman in 1866, he does sport a small goatee and moustache, but has no sideburns — the clean-faced kind of look Mercy seems to have appreciated. Nevertheless, though we hear of him calling on her, and bringing bouquets to her, we don’t hear much more of him. We don’t hear about whether he’s made sure to dance with her, and she never talks of teasing him. We don’t learn much at all about him through Mercy.

  Drinkwater was born in England, and worked for the railway until he became John A. Macdonald’s secretary. He returned to the railway later in his life, and became the first secretary of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The town of Drinkwater, Saskatchewan (more or less between Moose Jaw and Rouleau*) is named after him. He married the daughter of Duncan Graham in 1868.

  Charles Drinkwater in Montreal, 1866. Charles Drinkwater visited Mercy Coles every day when she was ill. Drinkwater was John A. Macdonald’s secretary, and was twenty-one years old at the Quebec conference.

  Nothing more is known of Mr. Crowther, Alexander Galt’s secretary, of whom Mercy writes: “Mr. Crowther is here. He came to call on me th
is morning. He wants to hold me good for the dance I promised him at Quebec.” Also, “I feel quite well this morning. I went down to the Ball last night. Such a splendid affair. Mr. Crowther danced with me the first Quadrille.” Crowther also called on Mercy every day when she was away sick. As is the case with the women, not as much information can be found on the less “distinguished” men as on those who already were so, or became so in time.

  Even the final conversation of which Mercy writes in her diary, the four-hour chat with Lewis Carvell, seems promising. But Carvell, at thirty-six, had been married sixteen years already, and had four children. He helped his brother Jedediah Slason Carvell run his very successful import and export business, Carvell Brothers, in Prince Edward Island. Jedediah had moved from New Brunswick to Charlottetown only recently in 1860. He was pro-Confederation, and had married a niece of Leonard Tilley’s first wife, Julia Hanford. Lewis Carvell, his wife, and some of his children moved at some point to Charlottetown, but they’re buried in New Brunswick.

  * * *

  * Rouleau is better known as Dog River in the television show Corner Gas.

  Fifteen

  Daughters and Fathers

  Meanwhile, one wonders what happened to all those other “Daughters of Confederation.” As the unmarried daughters and sisters of the delegates went along to the Quebec conference largely to (let’s face it) meet potential husbands among the unmarried men of the rest of the country, it would be interesting to know whether they succeeded.

  Ten young women, nine of whom were from the Maritimes, went to Quebec City, and on the tour of the Canadas, in October 1864. Their fate afterward is something that is difficult to trace. In some instances, in which there was more than one daughter of marriageable age in a family, one can only make a best-guess estimate of who went on the trip, based on the ages of all the sisters. The women from Prince Edward Island were Mercy Coles, Margaret Gray, and Mary Alice Brecken Haviland Alexander. From Nova Scotia, there was Emma Tupper, daughter of Charles Tupper, and Joanna Archibald, daughter of Adams Archibald. Four of the single young women came from New Brunswick; there were two of William Steeves’s daughters — likely Caroline Steeves and either Lucinda, Henrietta, or Martha. Also from New Brunswick was Charlotte Elizabeth Gray, daughter of Colonel John Hamilton Gray; and Jane Fisher, daughter of Charles Fisher. Jessie McDougall, daughter of William McDougall, was the only young woman from Canada who was present in Quebec City.

  Researching women’s history is no easy task. Mercy herself never recorded the first names of the other young women with her (except for once, when she wrote that the doctor told her that his daughter Emma was sick). Often, information on a father makes very little reference, if any, to his children, particularly female children. Here is the listing for Colonel John Hamilton Gray of PEI, from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, as an example:

  [S]oldier and politician; b. 14 June 1811 at Charlottetown, P.E.I; … m. first Susan Pennefather (d. 1866), and they had at least two children [Gray had five daughters with Susan Pennefather]; m. secondly in 1869 Sarah Caroline Cambridge, and they had three children; d. 13 Aug. 1887 at Charlottetown.

  If a list of children can be found, often the daughters’ names are overwritten by their husbands’ names, for example, as “Mrs. Alfred Seymour” as in the case of William McDougall’s daughter, Jessie. One then has to find out who Alfred Seymour is in order to find the first name of his wife, and then discover whether she, as an unmarried woman, went along for the Confederation talks and tour.

  Prince Edward Island’s Colonel Gray’s daughter Margaret was interviewed by the Halifax Herald seventy-three years after the Confederation talks in Charlottetown, and the September 1, 1937, Winnipeg Free Press reported on the article. Under the title “She Saw Canada Born,” the article opens with:

  Down in Prince Edward Island resides the last living link with that historic moment in Canada’s life — the Quebec Conference of 1864 — which laid the plans for a united Dominion. That person is the 92 year young [she was nineteen during the Confederation talks] Mrs. Artemus Lord, daughter of Colonel John H. Gray. She heard the Fathers of Confederation plan a Canada that would extend from sea to sea.…

  In the summer of 1864, says the Halifax Herald, Miss Gray had been visiting in Halifax and it was just after her return that the Nova Scotia delegates arrived in Charlottetown to confer with the Islanders and to pick them up so they could all travel together to Quebec.*

  Among the delegates was Dr. Charles Tupper, and with him were Mrs. Tupper, and their pretty daughter Emma. Dr. Tupper was attracted by his friend’s lively daughter, and asked: “Col. Gray, why don’t you bring your daughter to Quebec?”

  “Too late now,” smiled Col. Gray, looking at his great silver watch. “We have only 15 minutes before we start for the dock.”

  “Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Gray [who didn’t go because she was quite sick and would die within two years], “if you’ll take her, I’ll get her ready before the boat sails.”

  There is something wrong about this story, regarding the dates, and what happened when; nevertheless, it’s an interesting bit to add about another one of the “Daughters of Confederation.” There is little more of substance added by this article — we don’t even find out the woman’s first name — but we may be able to infer a bit about the dynamics at work during the social events.

  For example, it might say something about Charles Tupper and his “attractions.” In 1867, Moore writes, “He [Tupper] was married for sixty-five years, and friends insisted the marriage was happy and close, but letters — vanished now from Tupper’s papers but preserved in [John] Thompson’s — suggest a Tupper who was aggressively sexual.”** Sandra Gwyn’s The Private Capital also contends Tupper had relations with women other than his wife. We never hear Mercy mention anything like that about Tupper, and Margaret Gray’s account here seems like a tame recounting of a simple and friendly request, but who knows? Perhaps there is more to this story than meets the eye.

  Margaret Gray kept extensive diaries, thirty of which have been preserved. The one from 1864 has not been found. Margaret married Artemus Lord, a businessman and civil servant, about 1870. She died in 1941, at ninety-six.

  William McDougall’s daughter Jessie is the one with whom Mercy goes shopping. McDougall’s biography lists his children thus: “William McDougall had six children: George, Harold, Gladwyn, Dr. Westroppe, Mrs. George Brown, and Mrs. Alfred Seymour.” Mrs. Seymour turns out to be the Jessie in question, and though listed last, she was his first-born daughter. She was only sixteen during the Quebec conference, and married Alfred Seymour in 1870, at age twenty-two. William McDougall became lieutenant-governor designate of the North-Western Territory in 1869, and went out to Pembina, Manitoba, early in the fall of that year. He took four of his children, as he’d just been widowed. It’s not known whether Jessie was one of them. McDougall’s job was to help transfer the land of the Hudson’s Bay Company to become part of the new North-West Territories; his hand-ling of the affair started the Red River Rebellion.

  McDougall’s right-hand man in setting up the Boundary Commission in the Red River was Major Donald Cameron. Charles Tupper’s daughter Emma had married Donald Cameron in July of 1869. She went with Cameron to Pembina, and was pregnant at the end of 1869. Cameron had a run-in with Louis Riel, and Riel had taken their belongings. Tupper, in his autobiography, Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada, which reads like a Boys’ Own adventure novel, writes of how he travelled from Nova Scotia to Pembina, by horse and foot, across the prairie plains day and night, in the cold and dark winter, to “rescue” her. He arrived on Emma’s doorstep at midnight on Christmas Eve. Tupper says she asked him what he was doing there.

  Emma and Cameron set up an estate, Emmadale, in Manitoba. They had seven children. The first one, Sophie Tupper Cameron, was born in Halifax at the end of April 1870, and so Emma must have returned home to have the baby, as her fath
er and mother wanted.

  Emma Tupper, October 29, 1864, in a photograph by William Notman. The portrait is a negative that had not been digitized before, and was discovered by the McCord Museum during this research into Emma Tupper.

  Thomas Haviland’s widowed sister, Mrs. Alexander, was the only other single woman from PEI, aside from Mercy Coles and Margaret Gray, who went to the Quebec conference. She also vied for Leonard Tilley’s attention. Her name was Mary Alice Brecken Haviland. She’d married Thomas Alexander in 1856 in England, and he’d died in 1860, so they were married just four years, and she’d been widowed another four before the Quebec Confederation conference. She did not marry again, and passed away in London, England, in 1881, at fifty-seven. Her father died in 1867, and he left a substantial sum of money to each of his children.

  Two of William Henry Steeves’s daughters went to Quebec. He had four daughters, the first three of whom would be about the right age to have accompanied him. Henrietta was born about 1838; Martha Jane in 1840; Lucinda in 1842; and Caroline (Carrie) was born in 1850. (Steeves’s two sons were born in 1846 and 1848.) According to family history, it was Carrie who went to Quebec, even though she was only fourteen. A cushion made from one of her dresses is displayed at the Steeves House Museum in New Brunswick.*** As she was just fourteen, it would seem likely that the sisters who didn’t go were spoken for. That may have been the case at the time, but the two older ones did not marry until 1870 and 1883. The third daughter, Lucinda, also married in 1883. In Samphire Greens: The story of the Steeves, Esther Clark Wright, a famous Atlantic Canadian historian in the mid-1900s, says Lucinda married an elderly man in Torquay, England. When William Steeves died in 1873, his wife took all six of the children, the four girls and two boys — who could hardly be considered children anymore — to England, where Steeves’s brother, Gilbert, lived. Wright says the three who married were all widowed soon after marriage, and Lucinda was the only one to have a child. Caroline never married, and at fourteen, she was the youngest of all of the women who went to the Quebec Confederation conference. Which one of Caroline’s other three sisters went is unknown, though perhaps it was Lucinda, as the next-youngest daughter. She would have been twenty-two years old then. Their “monopolizing” of the parlour and of Mr. Carver, the “beau of Miss Fisher’s,” didn’t help them any, it appears.