John A (48 page)

In the task of turning around public opinion in the Maritimes, loyalty constituted Macdonald's secret weapon. In Nova Scotia, loyalty to Britain, beginning with that of the tortured Joseph Howe, was even deeper than in Canada. In New Brunswick, attitudes were more ambiguous. After an 1864 visit there, the editor of the Kingston
British American
wrote, “They are more American [than Canadians]—more democratic in their tastes—have more of the ‘free' swagger in their manners…more flash-dressed ladies at Theatres and Concerts.”

What Macdonald now had to do was make certain that Maritimers understood what it was that Britain wanted of them—to join Canada. This, therefore, is what he proceeded to do.

 

TWENTY-ONE

The Turn of the Screw

The left arm is then extended a little, and the Queen laid her hand upon it which I touched slightly with my lips. Alexander Tilloch Galt, describing his presentation to the Queen

S
ometime in the spring of 1865, Macdonald figured out how to haul the Maritime provinces onto the side of Confederation. He would appeal to their sentiments about Britain. To do that, a Fathers of Confederation mission would call upon the Great White Mother.

No real reason existed for Macdonald and the other Canadian leaders to go over to London. In the legislature, Macdonald described the group's purpose as “to take stock…with the British Government”—about as vague a description as he could concoct. For a time Macdonald even protested that he was too busy to go. This excuse was blatantly untrue, because he was due to go to Oxford to collect his treasured honorary degree. But once Macdonald had committed himself to the trip, a doubting Brown agreed to go along as well. The actual topics to be discussed while they were in London were not easy to compile: the Imperial government had already made clear its wholehearted support for Confederation, and although there were defence matters to go
over—the Canadian government had just voted one million dollars for new defence works—no one in London had the least interest in provoking the United States by new military projects. Nevertheless, off went the Big Four—first Cartier and Galt in a ship that made a stopover in Halifax, giving them time for discussions on railway matters there, and then Macdonald and Brown shortly afterwards on a different vessel. The real purpose of their mission was to use the Imperial government to get the Maritimers to turn around and face in the right direction.

The softening process has already begun. The colonial secretary, Edward Cardwell, after his meeting with Brown the previous December, had dispatched to Canada the laudatory memorandum on Confederation that had so pleased his visitor. Still more useful was the covering note attached by Cardwell to the copies he sent to the Maritime lieutenant-governors. “Our official dispatch,” he wrote to Arthur Gordon in New Brunswick, “will show you that Her Majesty's Government wish you to give the whole [Confederation] scheme all the support and assistance in your power.” Britain's general policy, he explained, was “to turn the screw as hard as will be useful, but not harder.” Two discrete turns of the screw were then applied. Gordon was reminded that his career depended on his shepherding New Brunswickers towards voting for Confederation. His counterpart in Nova Scotia, Sir Richard MacDonnell, who had made no secret of his opposition to Confederation, was pulled out completely and sent to Hong Kong. He was replaced by a soldier hero, Sir William Fenwick Williams, who knew how to take orders. Less successfully, Prince Edward Islanders were warned that the bill for the salary of their lieutenant-governor might be transferred from London to Charlottetown, but this pressure made them only more truculent than they already were.

For the Big Four, the reception in London was at least as agreeable as had been the earlier one for Brown alone. The Colonial Office chose the moment of Macdonald's arrival to send word to the Maritime capitals that Maritime Union was no longer discussible; all that was left on the Maritimes' negotiating table, therefore, was Confederation.

The quartet did have diligent discussions with the appropriate British politicians on matters such as defence, Confederation, the prospects for Canada's renewing the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States and the future of the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West. At the only meeting that actually mattered, none of these topics was raised. That was the meeting with Her Majesty.

On May 18 the four went excitedly to Buckingham Palace in a carriage that picked them up at the Westminster Palace Hotel. On arriving, they discovered, to their mixed pride and terror, that Queen Victoria had asked for them to be presented first. “Dukes and Duchesses had to give way and open up a passage to us,” Brown reported to Anne. The procedure that followed was a trifle more complicated: it involved, as Galt described it to his wife, going “down on the right knee (a matter involving, in my own case, a slight mental doubt as to the tenacity of my breeches), the left arm is then extended a little, and the Queen laid her hand upon it which I touched slightly with my lips.” That ordeal completed, the quartet was kept together so the Queen could engage them in small talk, including an exchange with Cartier in French. Then she glided away.

Back across the Atlantic went a report that amounted to a command: Her Majesty and her Canadian ministers were as one.

Earlier, the four had spent little time at the Westminster Palace Hotel, because night after night they were out dining at
the mansions of dukes and lords and cabinet ministers and railway magnates, or they went to balls where coiffed, bare-shouldered ladies exhibited a remarkable interest in the details of Canadian politics, economics and culture. No less deeply interested in Canadian doings was the Prince of Wales. He had them over to dinner at Buckingham Palace, drew them into an inside room filled with a specially selected group of one hundred of the two thousand guests, and while chatting with them smoked cigars and showed off his new Turkish dressing gown. (In an exercise in re-gifting, Galt was given one of these cigars, which earlier had been presented to the prince by the King of Portugal.) Less interested in the Canadians and in Canada was Bishop Wilberforce, who, as Brown reported to Anne, asked “whether Darwin believed that ‘turnips are tending to become men.'”

Queen Victoria. The last British monarch with real political influence, she used it to give Confederation the push it needed to overcome Maritime opposition.

They also went to the Epsom Downs on Derby Day, taking with them a hamper of food and wine from Fortnum and Mason. The
Times
's famed war correspondent from the Crimean War, William Russell, took them around, getting them into one of the most socially fashionable of tents, where they sipped turtle soup and champagne cup. They took in the races (Macdonald won twenty guineas) and gazed, as Galt reported to his wife, at “the sights of the course, gypsies, music, mountebanks, games of all kinds, menageries of savage animals, and shows of Irishmen dis
guised as savage Indians.” On the jam-packed road driving back, they used the roof of their carriage as a mobile platform from which to fire dried peas through a peashooter at passersby, who, as was customary, fired back balls of flour. Brown and Macdonald also went together to the opera
Lucrezia Borgia.

That was it. Official replies to their queries about specifics such as defence were exasperatingly vague. There was one significant shift in their own attitudes, though. The people they had met, Brown reported home, “are a different race from us, different ideas, different aspirations, and however well it may be to see what the thing is like, it takes no hold on your feelings, or even of your respect.” Galt was more easily impressed, writing back, “We were treated as if we were ambassadors and not as
mere Colonists,
” yet even he added warily, “it bodes no good no matter how flattering it may be.”

Three of the four returned home on June 17. Macdonald stayed a week longer to go up to Oxford for his honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. “This is the greatest honour they can confer, and is much sought after by the first men,” Macdonald reported in delight to his sister Louisa. He made it back to Canada early in July.

While little or nothing specific had been accomplished, things could hardly have gone better. Before the Canadians left, Cardwell gave Governor General Monck the green light to employ “every proper means of influence to carry into effect without delay the proposed confederation.” Above all, Confederation had been given de facto Royal Assent.

The Confederation project now resumed its forward motion, if still creakily. A shift in Maritime public opinion began. To help
it along, Cardwell began to dangle before the Maritimers the possibility of improvements in the terms agreed to in the Quebec Resolutions. Those most attracted by this bait were the Maritime Roman Catholic bishops, who set out to secure guarantees for their separate schools.

On closer scrutiny, Confederation's election defeat in New Brunswick turned out to be less crushing than it had first seemed. The Saint John
Telegraph
calculated that the vote had been 15,979 for the anti-Confederate Smith against 15,556 for Tilley. A key by-election was due that fall. To help New Brunswickers make the right judgment about what to do, Tilley wrote to Macdonald, estimating first that victory would require “an expenditure of 8 or ten thousand dollars,” and then asking, “Is there any chance of the friends in Canada providing half the expenditure?” On the back of this letter, Macdonald scribbled to Galt, “Read this. What about the monies?” Later, Charles Brydges of the Grand Trunk Railway reassured Macdonald that he had “sent the needful to Tilley” and had “kept all our names here off the document.” Down went Canadian money; in came the votes for the pro-Confederate candidate.
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By the fall, New Brunswick's Lieutenant-Governor Gordon was able to brag to London, “I am convinced I can make (or buy) a union majority in the Legislature.”