John A (13 page)

Governor General Lord Elgin, with his wife, Mary Louisa, her sister and an aide. Unusually able and far-sighted, he ended Durham's assimilationist policy by reading the Throne Speech in English and then, for the first time ever, repeating it in French.

The main immediate beneficiaries of the change were the graduates now pouring out of Lower Canada's
collèges classiques.
Historian Jacques Monet has memorably described what happened in his essay “The Political Ideas of Baldwin and Lafontaine”: “With a kind of bacterial thoroughness it [Quebec's emerging middle class] began to invade every vital organ of government and divide up among its members hundreds of posts.” Monet went on to remark that Canadiens “came to realize that parliamentary democracy could be more than a lovely ideal: it was also a profitable fact.”

Elgin accepted this downgrading, for himself and for his successors. In a dispatch to the colonial secretary he remarked that,
henceforth, governors general would have to depend on “moral influence,” adding, surely without really believing it, that this could “go far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of patronage.” Even Baldwin, himself skittish about patronage, declared stoutly in a legislature speech that “if appointments were not to be used for party purposes, let those who thought differently occupy the treasury benches.”
^*40

As always in government, some of the consequences of Responsible Government were unanticipated. The transfer of power from the governor general to elected politicians meant that Canadians hereafter placed blame for the mistakes that all governments make no longer at the entrance to their governor general's residence but at the doors of their cabinet ministers and premiers. Certainly, the tone of Canadian politics worsened from this time on. Sectarianism, or the injection into politics of the rivalries, suspicions and hatreds between religious groups, now became the dominant issue in Canadian politics. No less significant, once the premiers occupied the shoes of the governors general, they began to acquire some of the quasi-dictatorial habits of those who had run the country before the change to Responsible Government in 1848. Cabinet ministers now became the premiers' ministers, just as they had once been ministers of the
Crown's representative. The ascent to an imperial prime ministership—best described by Donald Savoie in his
Governing from the Centre
—began very early in this country's history; it happened, moreover, far earlier here than in the United States, occurring there largely because the United States acquired immense foreign responsibilities—always quasi-imperial in their nature—which was not at all the case here. An imperial prime minister is another political attribute that is as Canadian as maple syrup.

These were epochal changes to Canada's political makeup. Yet Macdonald's contribution to them was almost non-existent. He made a few somewhat critical but carefully noncommittal comments about Responsible Government as a potential threat to the connection with Britain. For the most part, though, he simply listened and learned. It wasn't long, now, before the era of Responsible Government would be replaced by the era of government by Macdonald.

 

EIGHT

A Short Time before the Long Game

My plan thro' life is never to give up; if I don't carry a thing this year, I will next. John A. Macdonald

M
acdonald's appointment by Conservative premier William Draper to the junior cabinet post of receiver general on May 22, 1847—roughly equivalent to being minister of revenue today—constituted a respectably rapid promotion. By then he'd been in the legislature for just three years and was only thirty-two years old. The Toronto
Globe,
the champion of the Reformers, dismissively advised its readers that he was “a harmless man” who, during two sessions of the legislature, had “barely opened his mouth.” The
Montreal Transcript
was more positive, describing Macdonald as “a rising man.” Nevertheless, there was more to the
Globe
's judgment than partisanship.

Macdonald's public record was certainly thin. In each legislature session he'd seldom delivered more than one speech, and his contributions had almost all been on secondary issues. He still seemed undecided whether to make politics or the law his primary career. Indeed, Macdonald had been offered his first cabinet
position—as solicitor general—as early as the winter of 1846–47 but turned it down because “it would make me too dependent on Govt and I like to steer my own course.” During his ten months in the two junior portfolios that he did accept (the second being the somewhat more substantial one of commissioner of Crown lands), he made no great impression. Late in 1847, Macdonald introduced a bill to amend the charter of King's College in Toronto in a manner that would square the interests of the founding Anglicans with those of other religions, notably Catholics, then excluded from the college. His attempt at conciliation failed, and he had to withdraw the bill.

A sharper observer would, nevertheless, have marked Macdonald as a legislator with potential. From the start, he was a popular member of the cosy club that all parliaments become. He sat through the interminable debates, cheering on fellow Conservatives and heckling opposition members—principally the loose group of Reformers—with teasing quips. He spent many hours studying in the library. He schmoozed and chaffed and drank with the best of them, and for as long as any of them. And while he seldom spoke, his speaking style was fresh and effective. Rather than the hours-long orations then the convention, Macdonald's speeches were short (seldom more than thirty minutes in duration) and conversational in tone, as though he were talking to each member across a dinner table.

As a politician, Macdonald suffered from one serious defect, especially in those days when oratory mattered and there were no microphones to add body and timbre to a speaker's voice. Even his highly laudatory biographer Joseph Pope admitted that Macdonald “could not be called a great speaker” and that his voice, “while pleasant, was not strong, nor remarkably distinct.” Journalists covering the debates complained constantly that his low voice and manner of delivery—“careless utterance, irregular
inflections of voice and general disregard for acoustic effect,” in the phrase of one—caused them to miss parts of his speeches. The leading journalist Hector Fabre (later a senator and diplomat) noted that “he is languid at times at stating his case and rather gropes through his opening sentences.”

Macdonald rarely prepared his speeches in advance but felt his way along, testing out arguments and lines that might get through to his audiences, and chopping and changing them until he was hitting the mark. Pope, with a tone of amused resignation, recalled that Macdonald often wrote down the topic headings for his speech on the back of an envelope, which he then “not infrequently contrived to mislay.” As a consequence, despite some disorganization, he kept that vital ingredient of spontaneity. There may have been defects in his speeches in conventional terms, but Macdonald consistently held his audiences. Even in his earliest years he pulled members into the House because he put on such a good show. Fabre remarked on the “matchless tact” with which Macdonald crossed swords with opponents, scoring points but never drawing blood, because, as he put it, Macdonald was “too clever and too well-versed in the knowledge of mankind to be cruel: his executions are always amusing; they extort a smile even from the gloomiest victims.” Above all, his listeners knew that at one point or other Macdonald would make them laugh—and that often he would make them laugh at themselves.

Macdonald possessed another invaluable asset that made him difficult to outpoint in extemporaneous debates: he had an exceptional memory. He possessed, as many successful politicians do, an uncanny ability to remember names and faces. The examples are endless. J.P. Reeves, once a resident of Kingston, met Macdonald after an absence of more than twenty years when he was a member of a guard of honour in Belleville. “Hello, Reeves. Stand at ease,” said Macdonald, after which they talked about old
times. A Mr. Munroe, whom Macdonald had met once at a convention in Kingston in 1849, he remembered by his correct name when they met again thirty-three years later in St. Thomas. Either in jousts in the legislature or in contests with hecklers on the stump, Macdonald repeatedly gained an advantage by tossing out extracts from documents he had read long before, including statements once made by his opponent of the moment. The combination of his memory and his constant reading left him never short of quotations from British authors such as Trollope and Dickens. His journalist friend T.C. Patteson once got into a literary argument with colleagues and, to settle it, wrote a letter to Macdonald asking what line followed “Ye gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease.” Back instantly came the answer, written on the reverse of Patteson's note, “Ah, little do you think upon the dangers of the seas.”

Perhaps the most striking example of Macdonald's memory concerns a newspaper article that he scanned quickly in 1840 and then, forty years later, referred to while giving a speech in the Commons. In the speech, Macdonald recalled that “an Indian once said to myself, ‘We are the wild animals; you cannot make an ox of a deer.'” He then used this example to support his argument that “you cannot make an agriculturalist of the Indian.” The original article, written by an Anglican missionary to a Mohawk community at Napanee, near Kingston, described how an Indian chief had told him that God had made all kinds of different animals, from the wily fox to the industrious beaver, and also all kinds of different men. “Now you cannot teach the fox to live like the beaver, nor can you make the Indian work and live like the white man,” reasoned the chief. “I have a farm and could live by it, but when the season comes for game or fish…I am tempted to go and look for it, even to the neglect of sowing and gathering my crops.” With such a memory bank to draw on, Macdonald was
not an easy opponent to outwit.

Behind the scenes, Macdonald's aptitudes and talents were beginning to get recognized. William Draper, an able man but lacking in the political skills needed to be a successful premier, began to regard him as a protégé. In March 1847 he summoned Macdonald to Montreal to help him brief the new governor general, Lord Elgin—in particular to make sure that Elgin understood the party sufficiently well not to “mistake ultra Toryism for Conservatism (i.e., selfishness for patriotism).” Elgin later described Macdonald in a dispatch home as “a person of consideration,” although, for reasons not entirely clear, relations between the two men were never cordial.

Yet Macdonald remained an on-again, off-again politician. He had ample personal reasons for his ambivalence. Home was now either a silent house in which the prostrate Isabella waited for him to return to inject life and energy into it, sometimes silently turning accusatory eyes towards him when he arrived late, or, ever more often, the bleak anonymity of a boarding house in whichever city—Montreal, Toronto, Quebec—the legislature had rotated to. He had to worry about his mother, who, as she suffered a succession of twelve strokes, was looked after by his sister Louisa. “Poor Mama
has again been attacked with another apoplectic affliction, and only the most prompt and vigorous measures have restored her,” he wrote to Margaret Greene on September 18, 1847. In that same letter he spelled out the range of his personal problems: “Isabella is struggling for strength enough to join me in Canada this winter. I doubt much whether she will be able to muster vigour enough to do so, and I fear that neither Margaret nor Louisa will be able to go to New York to look after matters.” Isabella did come back the following spring; that summer their infant son, John Alexander, died in his crib.

Helen Macdonald in the 1860 s. Hardy and strong, she survived eleven of twelve strokes. Her preferred language was Gaelic.

All that was left to Isabella now was Macdonald himself. Yet the demands of his cabinet portfolio and, at the same time, of ever-mounting difficulties at his law practice kept pulling him away from her. The more he moved away, the more frantically she tried to hold on to him. “She is just putting the finishing stitch to a new waistcoat for me, which I am to sport as a winter vest.” Late in 1848, Macdonald wrote to Margaret Greene to report: “I returned last week from Toronto, my dearest sister, where I had been for the fortnight previous, attending the sittings of the Court of Queen's Bench,” to find that Isabella “had been practising sitting up for a few minutes daily in my absence in order to be able to surprise me by coming to dinner which she effected. We had our little table brought to her bed room, and there we dined in State.” He would leave the house at nine each morning, returning around six, and he admitted that “her time passes very monotonously out here.”

Isabella did have some duties to occupy herself. “She had as much to do as she is able for, in directing the household affairs, managing her servants etc., and I can assure you, such is her attention and method that confined to the room though she may be, she makes a capital housekeeper,” he told Margaret Greene. Everything was kept neat and tidy, and “
my
dinner, the great
event of each day, about which poor Isa takes the greatest pains, is served up as well as one could wish.” Even when confined to bed day after day, as was increasingly the case, she still struggled to keep connected to him—just. “She is like the ‘Invisible Lady' that used to exhibit, not ‘show' herself some years ago,” he told Margaret Greene. “The invisible Lady's voice orders & behests are heard and obeyed all over the house & are carried out as to cupboards which she never sees & pots & pans that have no acquaintance with her. Not a glass is broken or set of dishes diminished, but she knows of, and calls the criminal to account for.”

Politics, though, kept demanding his attention. He had to go to Montreal, “but not for long,” and yet, “the idea of my going distresses her so much that I would not go, were it not a matter of necessity.”

In a letter Macdonald sent to Margaret Greene in January 1850, he sounds like someone feeling himself pulled apart by horses charging in different directions. “Since September last I have been alone and without a [law] partner,” he wrote. “Isa says I work too hard, & in truth I begin to feel that I do, but like a thief on the treadmill, I
must
step on, or be dragged.”