John A (65 page)

^*49
Brown condemned the slavers with the vivid phrase “men-stealers,” describing them as “a disgrace not only to Americans but to the whole world.”
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^*50
“Rep by Pop” was a most persuasive slogan, although what Brown really had in mind was rep by section—namely, that Upper and Lower Canada should have seats in proportion to their respective total populations. As was most curious, throughout the long Rep by Pop debate, little notice was ever taken of the fact that Upper Canada's own constituencies were even more unbalanced, varying as widely as from 4, 100 for Brockville to 80, 000 for Huron-Bruce.
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^*51
One of the might-have-beens in the development of Canadian intellectual life is Thomas Huxley, the great champion and popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution, who applied for and almost secured in the mid-1850s the post of professor of natural history at the University of Toronto. The slot was filled, instead, by the brother of Premier Sir Francis Hincks.
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^*52
Before Confederation and after it for several decades, premiers and prime ministers functioned at the same time as a regular cabinet minister. The practice eventually died out, although John Diefenbaker was both prime minister and minister of external affairs for a time in the years 1957 to 959. A rough contemporary equivalent would be that deputy prime ministers, largely a symbolic title, always hold a departmental portfolio.
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^*53
Before Drinkwater, R.A. Harrison, later chief justice of Upper Canada, and Hewitt Bernard, later his brother-in-law, functioned as Macdonald's private secretary while also performing other departmental duties.
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^*54
Sowby's master's thesis, an exceptional one, was written in 1984 for Queen's University.
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^*55
Langton developed a system of reporting the budget accounts in the 1850s that remained Ottawa's standard system down to the 1970s.
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^†56
He did not keep
all
copies of his own letters or of incoming ones. At the end of an 1856 letter to Brown Chamberlain of the Montreal
Gazette
in which he had made some frank political observations, Macdonald advised, “I hope you burn my letters. I do yours.” In fact, Chamberlain kept the letter.
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^†57
Even his bitter opponent, Sir Richard Cartwright, admitted that Macdonald could “generally lay his hand on any document he wanted, even after a long lapse of years.”
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^*58
Officially, their titles were those of attorneys general for Canada West and Canada East, or for each of the new “sections” within the United Province of Canada, but the old Upper and Lower Canada titles were widely used.
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^†59
Archy Lanton was an escaped American slave who had made it across the border.
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^*60
Much of the material for this section is drawn from the research done by historian Donald Smith of the University of Calgary and reported in his long article “John A. Macdonald and Aboriginal Canada,” published in
Historic Kingston
, 2002.
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^*61
Macdonald was friendly also with John Cuthbertson, the son of a Scottish fur trader who had married a Mohawk woman.
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^*62
Reiffenstein's actual arrest, in 1869, was the talk of Ottawa, primarily because the police came to his house and arrested him at his own dinner table.
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^*63
The Legislative Council, of which Taché was a member, was the pre-Confederation equivalent of the Senate.
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^*64
In Noel,
Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896
.
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^*65
As is the case with most early newspaper reports of parliamentary debates, the language of this quotation is curiously stilted, with Macdonald appearing to have spoken in the past tense. No Hansards were published before Confederation.
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^*66
That Lower Canada's agricultural productivity was at most one-fifth of that of Upper Canada was widely attributed to its antiquated seigneurial system.
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^*67
The capital by this time rotated between Toronto and Quebec City, Montreal having lost the honour as a result of the burning of its parliament buildings in 1849 by a Conservative-organized mob.
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^*68
Many years later, when Macdonald was sent a copy of Collins's 1883 biography of him—the first—he didn't bother to read it but “turned,” as he put it in a letter to a friend, to just two sections: one, understandably enough, was the Canadian Pacific Scandal; the other was the “double shuffle.”
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^*69
Cauchon eventually crossed the floor to join the Liberals, becoming a minister in Alexander Mackenzie's government.
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^†70
There is a bust of him (in a Roman toga) in the Quebec City legislative building, and in Montreal, besides parks and schools, he is commemorated with an eighty-seven-foot-high statue inscribed with his cry, “Avant tous, je suis Canadien.”
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^*71
Over succeeding years, a succession of transportation and communications enterprises, all either government agencies or dependent on government support, would locate in Montreal—Canadian National Railways, the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, Telesat Canada.
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^*72
His wife, Hortense, was deeply pious. A family friend remarked that she would have been happiest as a nun—provided she was the Mother Superior. After Cartier's death she moved to Cannes with her two daughters, dying there in 1898. One daughter, Hortense, lived on in Cannes until 1940, when she left hurriedly as the Germans approached. She died in London in 1941 at the age of ninety-three.
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^*73
The rival time span occurred near to the century's close and continued into the next, prompting a new prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, to predict that the twentieth century would belong to Canada.
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^*74
From Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” published in 1867.
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^*75
This near declaration of race war was written not by Brown but by his able and extremist chief editorial writer, George Sheppard.
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^*76
Macdonald's spelling of “favour” in the American style of “favor” was unusual; he may have picked it up osmotically because he was writing from south of the border.
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^*77
The tavern, now called the Royal Tavern, still exists, at 344 Princess Street in Kingston.
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^*78
In his day, Bulwer-Lytton was far better known as a popular writer—as of the romantic novel
The Last Days of Pompeii
—than as a politician. Today, he's best known as the inspiration for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing, which takes off from his famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” This association is a bit unfair, given that Bulwer-Lytton also minted the aphorism that writers love to quote, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
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^*79
The most unorthodox version of confederation, submitted to the legislature of Upper Canada in 1825 and advocating a loose federation, was by Robert Gourlay, who turned out to have written it while in a lunatic asylum in England. Gourlay was an engaging eccentric and an agrarian radical. His most considerable accomplishment was, at the age of eighty, to contest a riding in Upper Canada and to marry his twenty-eight-year-old housekeeper. However, he lost both.
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^*80
Creighton's case for Macdonald as an early champion of Confederation rests primarily on a speech he gave in the House in April 1861 calling for “an immense confederation of free men, the greatest confederacy of civilized and intelligent men that has ever had an existence on the face of the globe.” All those golden phrases, though, were simply Macdonald at his “buncombe” best.
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^*81
The imbalance wasn't simply one of political representation in proportion to population. About three-quarters of all Canada's tax revenues came from the Upper Canada “section.”
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^*82
In his
Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States
, from which much of the material in this section is drawn, Ian Radforth observes that one problem for the tour's organizers was that the towns and cities of then underdeveloped Canada lacked any of the “grand avenues and parade grounds” so necessary for ceremonial spectacles.
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^*83
Newcastle thus became the first colonial secretary to visit the most important of the colonies he was responsible for, and the only one to do so during the nineteenth century.
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^*84
Years later, the Prince of Wales encountered a Canadian MP in London who answered the prince's inquiry by saying that he came from Kingston. “Ah,” replied Edward in a deft reference to his aborted visit, “it looks very well from the water.” Later still, on Queen Victoria's death in 1901, he succeeded to the throne as Edward VII. Throughout his life, he remained exceptionally close to a great many ladies.
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^*85
The unofficial official British view of Lincoln was even wider of the mark. Lord Lyons, the ambassador (minister) in Washington, informed London that Lincoln was “a rough westerner of the lowest origin and little education.”
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^†86
Seward had formed this view as a result of an extensive trip he made in 1857 across the British North American colonies, even north to Labrador.
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^*87
The evidence is questionable. In a book published in 1904, Goldwin Smith claimed that Gladstone had written to him during the war proposing that “if the North thought fit at this time to let the South go, it might in time be indemnified by…Canada.” Smith said that he had later destroyed Gladstone's letter because it might “prove embarrassing.”
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^*88
More than half of these Canadian volunteers were Canadiens. Mass migration from Quebec to the United States during the nineteenth century dates from the Civil War years, in large part because of the classic “pull” factor in migration—those who've already gone to or already know a new country always attract others to follow them.
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^*89
Great Eastern
raced across the Atlantic in a new record of eight days and six hours, going full speed through icefields—as would, less successfully, another “world's largest ship” a half-century later.
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^*90
Not until 1887, in a conversation with his friend Judge Gowan, did Macdonald disclose for the first time his front-line experience, or, more accurately, his near to the front-line adventure. His company was placed safely behind the artillery that levelled the tavern and killed eleven of the hapless rebels.
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^*91
The most powerful expression of Canadien sentiment about Americans was Premier Taché's famous prediction that “the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French-Canadian.”
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^*92
Polk's name still lingers among Canadians as the author of the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight,” meaning that the border should be pushed way up north from the forty-ninth parallel.
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^*93
In 1793 Governor Simcoe prohibited the importation of slaves into Canada. Existing owners were allowed to retain their slaves, but most were freed not long afterwards.
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^*94
There was a small reverse flow, mostly of Northern draft dodgers, or “skeedadlers” as they were called, but most of them returned home once the Civil War was over, as did most of the runaway slaves. Late in the century, after the Midwest was filled up, American farmers moved north in search of land, particularly in Alberta.
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^*95
A further defence problem revealed by the
Trent
crisis was that the telegraph line from Halifax to Montreal was being tapped by the Americans.
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^*96
The
Globe
's first reference to Macdonald's habit, in February 1856, was in the correct, coded form of describing him as speaking in the legislature “in a state of wild excitement.”
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^*97
Even the term “alcoholic,” applied to a person, didn't exist then. It was not coined until 1891, the year of Macdonald's death.
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^*98
The first to make this observation was Frank Underhill. In a paper he presented to the Canadian Historical Association in 1927, Underhill, in the terminology of those less-evolved times, described Anne Brown as “perhaps the real father of Confederation.”
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^*99
In counterpoint to whatever credit Britain gained by its abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833, it incurred the off-setting discredit of initiating the Opium Wars at about the same time, employing the Royal Navy to blast open China's ports to the opium trade.
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