John A (32 page)

The increased confidence in the loyalty of Americans living here wasn't matched by any waning of suspicions about the intentions of America itself. The most forceful expression of this view was McGee's: “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; and then picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by their getting California. They sometimes pretended to despise these [British North American] colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not the strong arm of England over us, we should not have had a separate existence.”

Some of the sources of mid-nineteenth-century anti-

Americanism in Canada would surprise and disconcert those in the twenty-first century who harbour the same views. Then, few felt any need to justify their attitude by attributing it to the doings of a particular president. Few felt any need to deny being anti-American themselves—particularly at a time when public debate was so decidedly ungenteel that explicit accusations of “traitor” were hurled routinely across the floor of the legislature.

One of the root sources of the shock and horror on this side of the border was Canadians' concern about Americans' lack of religiosity. Many Canadians—especially the Canadiens—regarded with deep misgivings the absolute division of church and state in the United States. There, no public money could be used to support faith-based schools. Deeply unsettling, further, was the
fact that several of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson among them, had expressed doubts about the divinity of Christ. Most shocking was the discovery of the questionable Christianity of President James Polk.
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On Polk's death in 1849, the New York press reported that he had received a last-minute baptism. The
Church
magazine of Toronto commented: “For four years the neighbouring republic was governed by an
unbaptized
President…. The anomaly must bring disgrace with it, and possibly something worse, to a nation professing to honour Christianity at all…. What would be thought of the Monarch of the British Empire, if he or she had never been baptized? Could such a thing happen in our Monarch, or in any other Christian Kingdom in the world? No!” Then there was Archdeacon A.N. Bethune of York, who declared in a sermon that republicanism meant “the extravagant wanderings and never-ceasing cravings of an unbridled ambition,” while monarchy meant “the inestimable blessings of law, order, quiet and true religion.”

There was also lively concern in Canada about the experiment in multiculturalism being attempted south of the border. The Nova Scotia humorist Thomas Haliburton, author of the highly successful Sam Slick series, put into the mouth of one character a complaint about the “human refuse” in American cities. And, near the century's end, the popular historian George R. Parkin wrote in disgust about “those pouring into the United States. Who were they? Icelanders, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, the Latin races of the South. People unaccustomed to self-government.”

As is more familiar, Canadians worried that Americans were inherently violent. Canadians were aghast at the gangs in U.S. cities, at the lynchings of Negroes, at the wars against Indians. It
was widely held by Canadians that Americans were licentious, the far greater frequency of divorce there being blamed on an excess of female independence. The cross-border differences were real; on its northern side there was no equivalent, even remotely, to the slaughter by the U.S. Army of forty-five thousand Indians during the nineteenth century; nor was there any equivalent to the slave system. (In Canada's early years there had been some slaves, brought in by Loyalists or held over from the French regime, but the system was abolished in 1793,
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two-thirds of a century ahead of the United States.)

The cardinal attitude of Canadians towards Americans in this century was crystal clear: they took for granted that they were morally superior. They also took for granted that their political and legal systems were superior. About other matters, from commerce to trade to education to scientific invention to the arts, they talked rather less. Not that all the talk north of the border was glib: the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin wrote shrewdly that, in an egalitarian democratic community, “where there is nothing to differentiate one man from another but wealth, nothing to aim at but wealth, character becomes materialized.”

This Canadian conviction of moral superiority is the answer to one of the most puzzling questions about nineteenth-century Canadians. It was posed by Sydney Wise and Craig Brown in their book
Canada Views the United States.
In it they described as “a seeming contradiction of nature, environment and proximity” the fact that “the bulk of Canadians, standing on the very threshold of liberty, were so little susceptible to American institutions.”

Not only were nature and the environment identical on both
sides of the border, so were the people themselves. In the mid-nineteenth century, Canadians and Americans were almost exactly the same people: both were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, except for the large number of black slaves in the United States. They were not just the same people but were often of the same families. Few Canadian families did not have a relative south of the border (in Macdonald's own case, his cousin Margaret Greene). Many, including many Canadiens, had lost a son or nephew or cousin to migration across the border in search of a better job; in reverse, most of the Loyalists and the American settlers had left kin behind. Most Canadians, therefore, for all their protestations of loyalty to the Queen and genuine belief in the superiority of British law and British politics, were perfectly well aware that the United States was incomparably richer, more advanced and developed, possessed a far superior education system (Harvard University dated back to 1636), and boasted grander buildings, roads, canals, railways.

To gain all the abundant benefits of being American, Canadians then needed to do little more than to declare collectively, “We want in.” Britain wouldn't have stood in their way, its leaders having declared repeatedly that they would accept Canadians' choice of independence. The succeeding step would have been, sooner or later, that of a “ripe fruit” dropping, passively and effortlessly, into the Union. But it never happened.

Macdonald did stand in the way. He possessed an instinctual understanding that the choice would be determined by passion, not by reason. That was why he so often escalated the emotional content of the public debate on the subject by accusing opponents not just of being wrong but of “treason” and even of “veiled treason”—this phrase being almost his trademark, although in fact its actual author was Disraeli. In the early 1860s, though, Macdonald was only the latest in a line of leaders, rather than the iconic, national leader he would become. The X factors
that decided the issue were Canadians' certitude of moral superiority and, as much, their certitude that British was best. These attitudes did stand in the way of annexation; neither of them, though, could have stopped an army.

Describing Macdonald as an anti-American, although it evokes a contemporary echo, doesn't position him properly. Ultimately, the United States was simply irrelevant to him, except on the occasions when it specifically threatened Canada. In the huge library that he eventually accumulated at Earnscliffe, his home in Ottawa, there were almost no American books. Except for his early sorties to Upper New York State, he always holidayed in Rivière-du-Loup, or in Prince Edward Island, or in England. During all his post-Confederation years as prime minister, he went only once to Washington on government business, and to no other city. He met only one president, Ulysses S. Grant, by accident at a reception. He took no interest in U.S. politics. He never showed any understanding that one reason many Americans favoured annexation was far less expansion for its own sake—although obviously an imperative—than that they believed, genuinely, that Canadians would be better off once Americans; Richard Cartwright, in his
Reminiscences,
was much closer to the mark when he observed that Americans “have always found it very hard to believe that we honestly preferred our own institutions to theirs.” As well, Macdonald was oddly unwilling to accept the legitimacy of, and most certainly the consequences of, American anger with Britain (and by extension with Canada) for the way that, during the Civil War, Confederate commerce raiders were allowed to be built under contract in British yards and then cross the Atlantic to sink Federal merchant ships. To
Macdonald, the United States was a
terra incognita
about which he had no desire, and felt no need, to learn anything.

Rejecting the United States didn't make him British. It made him a British-American, at a time when the descriptor “Canadian” was seldom used—other than by Canadiens. It made him, in other words, wholly British and at the same time wholly North American. While Macdonald went often to England, he never considered moving there, as many Canadians like him did, once they had retired—including the two first presidents of the Canadian Pacific Railway, George Stephen and Donald Smith; his political rival of the 1870s and 80s, Edward Blake; and, in his plans for the future, his own close ally Cartier. To them and to many other Canadians for quite a while yet, Britain was “home.” To Macdonald, although he loved to visit London, Canada was home.

For Canada to remain his home, it had to remain British. Had Canada ever become American during his time, it's just about certain that Macdonald would have left for the other side of the Atlantic.

The leitmotif of Macdonald's career and life was to preserve Canada's un-Americanness. To him, the perpetuation of its Britishness was essential to that cause. So too would be the Confederation project. The handily available tool he used to lever himself towards both these objectives was anti-Americanism.

That most Canadians thought the same way made his task that much easier—up to a point. Being Canadians, the fact that they overwhelmingly rejected the United States didn't prevent huge numbers of them from voting for it with their feet. By the end of the nineteenth century, one in five Canadians would be living in the United States.
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Besides stirring up the underlying anti-Americanism, the
Trent
crisis stimulated a pan-Canadian consciousness. Nova Scotia was then a separate colony, and especially emotionally close to Britain, because it was protected by the Royal Navy. Yet in the winter of 1861–62, Nova Scotians enlisted in their militia in proportionately greater numbers than did Canadians. The crisis also prompted the first serious debates about a long-discussed railway—the Intercolonial—to connect the Maritimes to inland Canada. (These discussions had been going on, entirely fruitlessly, since 1851.) The railway's justification was that it could be used to rush British reinforcements to Canada in winter rather than have them plod through the backwoods.
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The Imperial government now began to consider the possibility of guaranteeing the loans needed to build a railway that in itself would be uneconomic. The crisis marked the first instance of all British North Americans reaching out to each other.