John A (6 page)

The Scots of the nineteenth century were by no means perfect: they were clannish, hot-tempered, parsimonious and they drank an incredible amount—“the most drunken nation on the face of the earth,” according to
The Scots Magazine.
As the century progressed, Scottish culture turned increasingly inwards, judgmental and holier-than-thou. Macdonald, influenced by earlier attitudes, was a product of Scottish culture at its best.

For the Macdonalds, when they moved to Canada, the immediate benefit of being Scots was that they weren't alone in this strange, hard land but were enveloped by a clan. Besides the many Macphersons, the Macdonalds could claim ties of kinship to Shaws, Grants, Clarks and Greenes. In Kingston itself there were institutions like the St. Andrew's Society and the Celtic Society to provide the young Macdonald with contacts, social connections, insider gossip and information about upcoming business deals. Clannishness could hurt as well as help. As Pope wrote in his biography, Macdonald could never bring himself to trust fully a Campbell, even though one member of that clan, Alexander Campbell, was his later law partner and political organizer, sim
ply because the Campbells had massacred the Macdonalds in the Pass of Glencoe in 1692.

As Macdonald moved upwards, the circles of Scots ready to let him through their doors kept widening. Among the first directors of the Bank of Montreal—
the
bank, by a wide margin—eight were Scots; Canada's entire banking system was modelled on Scotland's. Almost every member of the original Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate was a Scot, including the founder-president, George Stephen. So was the country's greatest railway engineer, Sandford Fleming, the inventor of standard time. By 1880, even though numbering just one in seven European Canadians, half of Canada's industrial leaders would be Scots or the sons of Scottish immigrants. In Montreal, the country's financial and industrial capital, the city's business leaders included a McGill, a MacTavish, a Redpath. At the country's largest corporate enterprise in the nineteenth century, the Hudson's Bay Company, four in five employees were Scots. The country's biggest and best newspaper, the Toronto
Globe,
was owned and edited by a Scot, George Brown. All three of Canada's first universities—McGill, Dalhousie, Toronto—were founded by Scots; in
The Scot in America,
published in 1896, Peter Ross reckoned that “the entire educational system of the country, from the primary school to the university, is more indebted to the Scottish section of the community than to any other.”

As for politics, once Macdonald got there, he would be crowded around by fellow countrymen. Both he and Canada's second prime minister, Alexander Mackenzie, were Scots; so were the first two premiers of Ontario, John Sandfield Macdonald and Oliver Mowat. Of the “Big Four” among the Fathers of Confederation, all but George-Étienne Cartier would be Scots—Macdonald, Brown and Alexander Tilloch Galt.

Macdonald naturally played the advantage of Scottishness for all it was worth. When he met his first governor general, he did so wearing the “fine Macdonald Soft Tartan Kilt with Green Riband Rosette…[and] a silk Velvet Highland Jacket” that he'd bought in Edinburgh as part of his trip around Britain in 1842. He would drop Scottish sayings into speeches, such as “He'll cool in the same boots he got warm in.”

Yet he didn't sound much like a Scot. His burr was far less pronounced than that of at least two other Scottish-born political personalities of his time, George Brown and Alexander Mackenzie. Alexander Campbell, who knew him well and was himself from Kingston, wrote in an undated memoir that Macdonald was “in tone of voice & manner as thoroughly a Bay of Quinte boy as if he had been born there.”
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A complicating factor here is that, as is often the case with good storytellers, Macdonald was an excellent mimic. Yet Campbell was on to something. In speech, as well as in many other ways, Macdonald was far more a Canadian than he was a Scot. One journalist wrote of Macdonald, “It was long a moot question where he was born.” In a couple of substantial ways, he wasn't that much of a Scot: during all his many visits to England, he went only once to Scotland—on his first trip; also, he never had himself photographed looking like a Scot by wearing his tartan.

As a politician, Macdonald benefited in one last critical way from his Scottishness. For the most part, the four principal European ethnic groups in nineteenth-century Canada—English,
French, Irish and Scot—thoroughly disliked each other, while the Irish (Protestant and Catholic) disliked their own countrymen, if anything, even more. Within these discontents, though, there was one striking exception: the French and the Scots got on exceedingly well. It made a great difference that the man who made us, and who did so primarily by connecting together, politically, Canada's two great ethnic solitudes, should have been a Scot.

In the light of what he would achieve as a man, one aspect of Macdonald's youth is surprising. No one who knew him then recalled his having ever displayed any vaulting ambition or recounted any anecdote about Macdonald describing some hero he planned to emulate or to exceed. True, his mother predicted great things for him, but many mothers say that about their children. Several of his boyhood contemporaries, as well as some of his teachers, expected him to do well. No one, though, forecast that he would do better, by far, than anyone in the country had ever done. They hadn't misjudged his talents; they had failed to take account of his capacity for growth and, no less, his inexhaustible competitiveness.

 

FOUR

Horse Dealing, Tavern Keeping and the Law

Say nothing on business without receiving a fee in advance. Fellow lawyer's advice to John A. Macdonald

T
he suggestion that Macdonald should aim for a career in law had actually come first from his father. Hugh Macdonald pointed out that “the province was yet only in its infancy, was rapidly growing, and would soon need a horde of professional men.” For Hugh, such acuity in financial matters was rare, but this time he was absolutely right. Although clearly unusually intelligent, Macdonald had no money, so the attraction of a legal career was obvious: law required no start-up capital and no training at a university. Once the apprenticeship was served, the profession guaranteed at least modest prosperity to all but the indolent or the inebriated. As John Langton, Canada's first auditor general, remarked, “I know of no money-making business in Canada except the law, store keeping, tavern-keeping and perhaps I might add, horse-trading.”

Practising law came as easily to Macdonald as breathing. He soon showed himself deft at mastering briefs, remembering and using detail to good effect and, most effective of all, having a talent
for reading judges and juries. By the age of twenty-three he was already defending men on trial for their lives against some of the best-known counsels in the province. A few years later he was well on the way to establishing himself as a leading commercial lawyer. Had he stayed with the law, Macdonald would surely have made a great deal of money and, as did others, eventually used it to buy himself a knighthood and retire to leisurely comfort in England.

When George Mackenzie took Macdonald as an apprentice in 1830, Mackenzie specialized in corporate law, handling the accounts of local farmers, businessmen and merchants. Intelligent and amiable, he was one of Kingston's leading lawyers and would soon be nominated as the Conservative candidate for Frontenac. As a mark of his special regard for his clerk, Mackenzie invited Macdonald to board at his own house in Kingston. There the young man began to learn something about the graces in life, such as the joys of a fine dining room and an ample library.

From Mackenzie, Macdonald picked up two of the most valuable of all legal lessons. The first was to “say nothing on business without receiving a fee in advance.” The other amounted to an admonition to remember that, in law, personality counts for a good deal more than knowing the statutes. Mackenzie, after hearing that his junior was acting in a standoffish manner with clients, warned him, “I do not think you are so free and lively with people as a young man eager for their good should be. A dead-and-alive way with them never goes.” Later, in a third gift to his junior, Mackenzie sent Macdonald to the countryside to open a branch office for him in the town of Napanee, thereby providing independent responsibility and experience.

Hallowell (later Picton) is the Prince Edward County town where Macdonald filled in at the law practice of an ailing relative.

To a remarkable extent, good luck quickened the pace of Macdonald's advance as a lawyer, one of the comparatively few occasions in his career when he didn't have to create most of his own good fortune. Its source was the bad luck of several other lawyers. Macdonald's first stint on his own occurred when he temporarily replaced his sick relative, Lowther Macpherson, returning to Mackenzie's office when Macpherson died at sea after receiving treatment in England. In 1834 his own employer, Mackenzie, was struck down by the cholera epidemic of that year. Once he had set up his own shingle, Macdonald took over some of Mackenzie's accounts. Lastly, the sudden death in 1839 of another prominent Kingston lawyer, Henry Cassady, would enable Macdonald both to take over much of his business and to succeed him to the prime post of solicitor of the Commercial Bank of the Midland District.

Mostly, he advanced in his own way. From Mackenzie he had acquired the ambition to become a corporate lawyer. To do that, Macdonald opened his own office in Kingston in 1835. He posted
a notice in the Kingston
Chronicle
that “John A. Macdonald, attorney, has opened his office…where he will attend to all the duties of the profession. Kingston, 24 August, 1835.” At the time, he was only twenty years old, still a year short of being entitled to claim to be an attorney. He achieved that rank the next year when, after passing the necessary examination in Toronto, he was called to the bar. Soon afterwards, Macdonald himself took on two students of law. They were a remarkable pair. One was Alexander Campbell, later a cabinet minister under Macdonald and eventually lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The other was his one-time schoolmate Oliver Mowat, later a member of the legislature and, several years on, Macdonald's most relentless and effective political opponent as premier of Ontario. Macdonald came to loathe Mowat, remarking, in a reference to their school-days together, “The one thing I have always admired about Mowat is his handwriting.”

Macdonald set up his first office in rented quarters in Kingston's Quarry Street. A year later, early in 1836, both he and his entire family moved into a substantial house, two and a half storeys high and of roughcut limestone, on Rideau Street.
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Within this residence, he had both his bedroom and his study in the attic, confirming that he was already a success as a lawyer and was now effectively the head of the family, in place of the diminished and scarcely more than tolerated Hugh Macdonald.

Three years later, Macdonald moved both his office and the family home to the more fashionable Queen Street. In this office, helped by his clerks Campbell and Mowat, he busied himself with lucrative
but tedious work, such as chasing down unpaid bills and searching titles. And then, abruptly, he gave it all up—not the law itself, but the kind of law he was engaged in. For two years, from 1837, Macdonald devoted himself entirely to the practice of criminal law.

A youthful Oliver Mowat, later Macdonald's implacable opponent as premier of Ontario, but at this time a clerk in his law office.

His reasons for the switch can only be guessed at, because no record of his motive remains. However, a plausible explanation is easy to construct. As a criminal lawyer who took on dramatic cases, Macdonald got himself noticed well beyond the narrow confines of the Kingston business community. He was operating now in the arena where he would spend by far the greatest part of his life—the court of public opinion. And while there he was learning the arts of argument and of persuasion that would serve him all his political life. For a lawyer new in practice and still aged only twenty-two, he was taking a short-term gamble on a long-term goal, particularly given that he lost almost as many cases as he won.

Macdonald's first case involved William Brass, the son of a respected Loyalist accused of the horrendous crime of rape of an eight-year-old girl.
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The sentence for such a crime was death.
Working with an experienced courtroom lawyer, Macdonald offered a triple defence: Brass was not guilty; he was the victim of a conspiracy; or he had been insane at the time the crime was committed. His legal opponent was William Draper, then solicitor general and later premier of the United Province of Canada. While Macdonald lost the case, the Kingston
British Whig
reported that “Mr. John A. Mcdonald [sic]…made a very able defence in favour of the unhappy prisoner.” At Brass's execution, the rope proved to be too long and the wretched man fell to the ground from the gibbet, landing in his own coffin. He screamed out, “You see. I am innocent; this gallows was not meant for me.” The sentence was nevertheless carried out, the second time with a rope of the proper length.

Macdonald won his next case. Peter Anderson was charged with the murder of a friend, James Cummings, whom he had followed into the woods with a rifle after a quarrel between them. Later, Cummings was found dead from a rifle wound. Macdonald handled this case alone. After extensive cross-examination of Crown and defence witnesses, he was able to argue that Anderson had been seen two miles from the scene of the crime at the time it was committed. To the surprise of the local newspapers, the jury rendered a not-guilty verdict. The
British Whig
praised Macdonald for “an excellent address.” Campbell, who was then Macdonald's student at law, later observed in his memoir that Macdonald had won the jury over by his “humour and strong liking for anecdote more than for his professional knowledge.”
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His third case attracted much wider attention. In 1837 William Lyon Mackenzie rose up against the colonial administration and staged a brief tragicomic uprising in the capital of York. In Kingston, eight of his supporters assembled with a few weapons, but when they realized that no one else was going to join them they returned home. Still, they had taken up arms against the Queen. Macdonald took the bold course of appealing directly to the judge for an acquittal of the rebels on the grounds that the self-incriminating affidavits the defendants had signed after their arrest had been executed illegally by a police magistrate. The judge agreed and directed the jury to acquit the eight accused.