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Miss Confederation: Mercy Anne Coles

It is rather a joke, he is the only beau of the party and with 5 single ladies he has something to do to keep them all in good humour.1

The “he” mentioned in the above quotation is Leonard Tilley, who was then the premier of New Brunswick, and Mercy Anne Coles, the irreverent writer of this note, was one of those single women. Ten unmarried women altogether, three from Prince Edward Island, two from Nova Scotia, four from New Brunswick, and one from Canada West, accompanied their fathers or brothers to the conference in Quebec City, where the men negotiated Confederation and the creation of Canada.

The start of Canada’s journey to Confederation is a fascinating one, involving a circus; Farini, the tightrope walker from Port Hope, Ontario; the American Civil War; a whole lot of champagne, sunshine, and sea; and lovemaking — in the old-fashioned sense.

The process began in earnest when, in September 1864, the Fathers of Confederation, travelling by rail, steamship, and horse-drawn carriage, met in Charlottetown, the provincial capital of Prince Edward Island, to discuss the possibility of a union of Britain’s North American colonies.* Like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, PEI was an independent colony of the British Crown at the time. The final of this group of colonies, Canada, was made up of Ontario and Quebec, then known respectively as Canada West and Canada East. Each of the Maritime colonies was very small, and with a large and growing American neighbour, many of the colonies’ residents, including those of Canada East and West, felt that if they were to survive separate from the United States, then the time had come to join forces and form a larger political entity.**

Following their time in Charlottetown, the Canadian and Maritime delegates crossed the Northumberland Strait on the Canadians’ steamship, the Queen Victoria, and toured briefly through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, meeting in Halifax on September 12 for the delegates to discuss the idea of Confederation further. Mercy Coles, the unmarried twenty-six-year-old daughter of Prince Edward Island delegate George Coles, went with her father on this tour. From Mercy’s descriptions she was the only young woman to go on this trip with the delegates. Perhaps her father viewed this as an opportunity for her education, or to meet a potential husband.

The big meetings and events, though, were saved for Quebec City, where, in October 1864, the Maritime Fathers of Confederation, with their unmarried daughters and sisters in tow, travelled again on the Queen Victoria, which the Canadians had sent to bring the Maritimers up to Quebec City. They promenaded on the decks and looked out at the spectacular fall scenery along the shores of the St. Lawrence.

Mercy Coles was not part of this large group, however. She writes that her “father thought the trip [by ship the whole way] would be too rough for mother and me.”2 Instead, Mercy, her father and mother; William Pope (Colonial Secretary and a member of the Conservative Party, which was in power in PEI) and his wife; and Mrs. Alexander, the widowed sister of Thomas Heath Haviland (also a member of the Conservative Party), left on October 5, a day earlier than the others. They crossed from PEI to Shediac, New Brunswick, then took a train specially booked for them to Saint John. There they picked up Leonard Tilley, the aforementioned “only beau of the party,” as well as two members of Tilley’s government — Charles Fisher, with his daughter Jane, and William Steeves, with his two daughters.

From Saint John, they travelled by steamship down the Bay of Fundy, the trip taking twenty-four hours, to Portland, Maine (compare this to the sixty-plus hours it would take to get to Quebec City by ship). There was as yet no rail line from the Maritimes to Quebec through Canada, and so the group had to take this roundabout route through the United States. Of course, what the single women missed in the promenading on the Queen Victoria’s deck, they gained in the attention paid to them by the recent widower and then-premier of New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley.

In Quebec City, the Fathers debated and finally crafted the seventy-two resolutions of the British North America Act, the act that formed the Canadian constitution at the time, and which still forms the basis of the Canadian constitution today.

Politics was not the only thing on the minds of those discussing the creation of Confederation, however. The men viewed the conference and following tour of the Canadas as a wonderful opportunity for other matters; they brought along their unmarried daughters and sisters to … well, to promote unions of a different sort. Luckily for us, Mercy Coles kept a diary of her trip. She wrote of her travels and of the events, balls, banquets, people, and whirlwind of social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires.

The diary has never been published, and yet without it, Confederation history is — no question — incomplete. It is not the only such document, however: George Brown was one of the Canadian delegates, and the discovery, in the 1950s, of his letters to his wife, Anne, written during the Confederation conferences provided greater understanding of what made the union possible. The letters document the important relationships that were forged, and how those connections affected the views and attitudes of the delegates. The Mercy Coles diary also offers important insight into the people present at the Quebec conference, and provides the only report by a Canadian female of Canada’s social and political landscape in 1864.

Mercy Anne Coles was the third child of George Coles and his wife, Mercy Haine Coles. The couple had twelve children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, died in infancy. Their first nine children were girls. George Coles was a prosperous merchant, brewer, and distiller. In 1851, he led the Reform party to victory, and was PEI’s first premier. He led the government from 1851 to1854, and then, after six months out of office, from 1854 to 1859. Best known as the man who achieved responsible government for PEI in 1851, Coles was the leader of the Reform or Liberal Party, which was mostly supported by Roman Catholics, though Coles himself was Anglican. That he was able to muster such support, even in the face of the divisive issues that often fell along the religious lines of his time, is a tribute to the esteem in which Prince Edward Islanders held him, and is indicative of their support for his policies.

Coles was a self-made man, not one of the wealthy landowners whose politics tended to support absentee landlords and kept the many tenant farmers of PEI in a state of poverty. His government launched many remarkably progressive measures, such as the Free Education Act, which was passed in 1852. This act — the first in British North America, and possibly the first of this type of act in all of Britain’s colonies — provided free education for all primary school–aged children. The government also created a provincial fund to pay teachers’ salaries.

In contrast, other conference attendees from PEI, such as Colonel John Hamilton Gray, who was the premier of PEI in 1864, and Thomas Heath Haviland, who was among the ruling landowners, would have had different expectations and different values from those of Coles, just as their daughters and sisters would have also had different expectations and values from those held by Mercy.

These sharp differences in outlook and expectations existed despite the fact that all hailed from the relatively small city of Charlottetown. In 1838, the year Mercy was born, Charlottetown was a city with a population of just over three thousand people; although its population had doubled since then, it was still just over 6,700 in 1861. The province itself had a population of 80,552 by 1861, having grown in size by over thirty thousand people in the previous twenty-six years.

Like other cities at the time, Charlottetown had dirt streets that in the fall and spring were mired in mud. The Islander reported on April 14, 1863, that women, “on their way to church, [were] floundering about in the mud like swine in a hog-sty.”3 They’d get so stuck they had to have men pull them out. Even in much larger places, like Quebec City, which had a population of fifty thousand, the situation was similar. “You cannot put a foot off the sidewalk without plunging into mud,” wrote the correspondent for the Montreal newspaper La Minerve about Quebec City on Sunday, October 10, 1864,4 the day the delegates arrived on the Queen Victoria.

Prince Edward Island was almost entirely rural in the 1860s, and agriculture was, by far, the most important part of the economy. Only about 9 percent of the population lived in the capital city. There were reportedly 800 cattle, 850 sheep, 350 horses, and 400 hogs living in Charlottetown in 1861. Animals roamed the streets, and boys were hired to keep stray animals off them.5

Things were bad enough on normal days, but on days when the market was held, the situation became significantly worse. The market house, which at the time was in a serious state of dilapidation, was located in Queen Square — the same place that the seat of government, Province House, was located. Their proximity to each other caused a great deal of chagrin in many of the local politicians. Held twice weekly, year-round, the market was renowned for its filth: animal excrement, fish guts, and more littered the ground. Most of the vendors chose to sell their wares and produce outside, rather than be stuck inside the building. Even more filth and noise was the result.

It is of little surprise, then, that epidemics of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and typhoid were far from uncommon in Charlottetown. And although these types of epidemics were commonplace in other cities in British North America at this time, their impact was especially severe in Charlottetown, as there was no permanent hospital there until 1879.

In winter, the mail came and left by iceboat. Such trips were, at times, dangerous, and it was often questionable whether the mail would arrive at all. Evelyn MacLeod, in her annotations of the 1863 diary of Margaret Gray (the eighteen-year-old daughter of PEI’s premier, Colonel John Hamilton Gray), describes the small boats: “[They were] approximately seventeen feet long and four feet wide, and covered with heavy tin. Leather straps harnessed men to the boat as they hauled it across solid ice, and oars and sometimes a sail were used in patches of open water.” In describing the difficulties of receiving or sending mail, MacLeod quotes the Charlottetown Guardian on March 13, 1863: “Several attempts have been made during the week to cross the Straits but owing to the bad state of the ice they have proved ineffectual.”6

The ice often didn’t melt until the middle or end of April, and so shortages of many goods were common by the end of winter. As Margaret Gray wrote, the shops were close to empty by March.7 With no (or very slow) mail in or out, and no goods till the ice broke up and allowed steamers back into the harbour, Islanders were forced to be very self-sufficient.

The consequent privation that many in the province experienced was less of an issue for the Coles family, however, because of its large size and relative affluence. Also, although George Coles owned a brewery and distillery in town, the Coleses’ home was Stone Park Farm, on the outskirts of the city. It was four kilometres from Province House, and Mercy and her sisters were spared some of the day-to-day difficulties of living in town.

Despite the fact that they lived outside of the city, Coles’s daughters still benefitted from the education and culture that would have been more easily available to their urban peers. It’s likely that tutors came to the house, and the young women may have gone out to get specialized lessons in such things as singing. Margaret Gray, likewise, wrote that a tutor came to teach her and her sisters German, and that they went out for singing lessons. As well as such formal instruction, Coles’s daughters would also have been exposed to the sort of informal tuition offered by the lively discussions held in their home. George Coles would have entertained his political allies, and perhaps the discussions included the women of the household, as the Coles sisters were noted to be “well educated, well informed and sharp as needles.”8

Such is the background of Mercy Coles. It is important to keep this in mind, because this Confederation story is one told from a young, unmarried woman’s point of view. It is a story told by someone along for the events, and tied in that way to the goings-on. Yet, Mercy Coles was interested in something far different from the resolutions of the British North America Act. She was twenty-six, after all, when twenty-six was getting old to be single.*** Mercy had seven surviving sisters altogether. Her two older sisters were already married, and of the two just younger than she, Eliza was about to be married in December, and the other one already was. The next in line after that was already twenty years old. Thus, the pressure was on, and Mercy’s interest in the men she met during this time is not surprising. Many of the men, including John A. Macdonald, were taken with her. And here she was with a bevy of single women, younger and thus perhaps more desirable than herself, vying for the attention of Canada’s foremost bachelors.

In her Confederation photograph, taken by the celebrated Montreal photographer William Notman, Mercy’s eyes gaze back at the viewer with intensity and interest. Her long, dark hair, thick with curl, is parted in the middle and pulled back from her brow, in the style of the day. She liked to have fun, to dance, to sing. She was easy to talk to. She liked teasing and being teased. Her wide mouth and full lips must have smiled easily. Men found her intelligent and attractive, especially in her “irresistible blue silk.”9 They paid attention to her. And she definitely enjoyed receiving their attention — but then, who doesn’t, when they’re young and looking for love?

Mercy Coles, October 29, 1864.

And that’s what she was doing — amid the grand and heady spectacle of the balls, banquets, and events that went along with the Confederation Conference of October 1864, in Quebec City. It was the perfect place for such a quest, because that city was the headiest of places in Canada then, with its corps of officers, garrison of British soldiers in red uniforms, and regimental bands. It was the hub of cultural and diplomatic life, and the most debonair of any of Canada’s cities. Quebec City was, and is, strikingly beautiful, sitting atop a cliff, overlooking the St. Charles and St. Lawrence Rivers. The streets of the old city are cobblestoned, and wind crookedly past buildings and houses that look more European than North American.

Even amid the wonders of Quebec City and the conference events, however, it’s clear that the country’s politics affected Mercy Coles, too. This tale of the “Road to Confederation” is one shaped by a young female traveller interested in what all young people are interested in: falling in love, finding a mate, the excitement of travel, and the lure of “away.” It is the herstory of Confederation.

Mercy is refreshingly honest, and writes so blithely of people and events that we are caught in the moment in time at which history was being made, without the veneer and gloss time can create. We are allowed an intimate view into the past at this seminal period in Canada’s history, and at the men, now famous, or once famous and now forgotten, who shaped Canada’s future. Further, we’re exposed to a female voice at the making of Confederation.

Women were not part of any official delegation, but the importance of connections to, and relationships with, women was recognized by those who were, and so it was that women had an unofficial role in the negotiations. As PEI delegate Edward Whelan noted for his newspaper, the Examiner:

The Cabinet Ministers — the leading ones especially — are the most inveterate dancers I have ever seen, they do not seem to miss a dance the live-long night. They are cunning fellows; and there is no doubt it is all done for a political purpose; they know if they can dance themselves into the affections of the wives and daughters of the country, the men will certainly become an easy conquest.10

Mercy’s writings of the attention she received from men like John A. Macdonald and Leonard Tilley help us understand how the relationships at play worked to make Confederation a possibility.

In her diary, Mercy is willing to gossip; she’s open; she’s flirtatious. And yet she also shows a conventional side, happy to follow the strictures and guidelines expected of a young, single woman — but, interestingly, this is found mostly later in her diary, once the conference tour, and the possibility of her being wooed by any of the bachelors, has ended. Throughout, she maintains a sense of propriety — for example, she never mentions the first names of the other young women who attended the Confederation conference. Even when Emma Tupper and Margaret Gray visit her sickroom, she refers to them as “Miss Tupper” and “Miss Gray.”

As Mary McDonald-Rissanen points out in her recent work on Prince Edward Island women diarists, In the Interval of the Wave, young women at that time would have read a lot of “comportment” literature, books written to teach young women how to behave properly. Yet, Mercy Coles also gossips and is flirtatious in her behaviour, and we only know that because she’s written about it herself. Keeping a diary or journal is often used as a way to envision oneself, a way to create a self-identity through discovering oneself by writing. In the lively, breezy way in which she wrote, Mercy was definitely creating an image of herself, of how she wanted to be seen and how she wanted life to be.

In the 1860s, keeping a journal or diary was a way to achieve a level of independence, or at least the freedom to express one’s thoughts, even if only in writing. Diary-keeping was recognized as a genre fit for women, but only if there were no intention of publishing the writing. Thus, women were free from scrutiny in their private journals, and could even subvert society’s roles and ideals in playing at the creation of themselves.**** Mercy Coles was free to invent this persona who did not, in her writing life, behave as conventionally as she sometimes behaved in real life.

Taking the time to keep a journal or diary showed an awareness of the self, of one’s own story as unique from those of others, one that was worthy and important enough to record, even if it was only meant for oneself. It was also an indication of status: the woman who did this had enough time of her own, not absorbed by domestic duties, to write.

As the decades passed after Confederation, Mercy Coles obviously felt her diary was worthy of more attention than hers alone. Not only did she preserve it carefully, she took the time to share her stories and knowledge of Canada’s beginnings with others, such as in a Charlottetown Guardian newspaper article published in 1917 about her time in Quebec City.

The diary is everything one wants it to be: it’s gossipy, detailed, and full of social commentary. It is part travelogue, filled with detailed descriptions of her family’s travels across Canada, and then through the U.S. states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York on their return trip home to PEI. It covers the period from October 5, 1864, when she and her parents leave Charlottetown, to Thursday, November 17, 1864, when they return. Mercy writes of her seasick travel across the Northumberland Strait, and her journey by rail and ship to Quebec, all the single women flirting with Leonard Tilley, or vice versa.

The diary also covers the days of the conference itself, which began on October 10 and continued until October 26, with plenty of balls, banquets, parties, and outings — to court both the women and the Maritime delegates. The times, both politically and literally, were not quite as “sunny” as they’d been in Charlottetown, particularly for Prince Edward Island, which ended up opting out of the initial Confederation of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario. And the weather was appalling.

After the conference and tour of the Canadas ended, the Coles family continued on, through the United States, to visit with Mercy’s mother’s relatives. There, they travelled by train through cities busy drilling for oil and visited relatives caught up in the Civil War and the presidential election (Lincoln was re-elected just five months before he was assassinated), finally arriving at New York City — as bustling and busy then as it is now. Following their stay in New York, they travelled to Boston, and then returned to Prince Edward Island by steamer, meeting a couple forced to flee Atlanta, where their home had just been shelled by General Sherman in his “March to the Sea.”

The Mercy Coles diary gives us a direct look back in time. Her breezy notations, with their lack of pretence, give every indication that she didn’t intend her diary to be published, and that she wasn’t thinking about how what she wrote might sound later, after people had died, or events had become significant. With its simple, unaffected tone, the diary seems to offer the reader the possibility of a clear view of the past.

This seeming straightforwardness is not quite as simple as it seems, however. Things are complicated by the fact that another version of the diary exists. The Charlottetown Guardian published a piece entitled “Reminiscences of Confederation Days: Extracts from a Diary Kept by Miss Mercy A. Coles When She Accompanied Her Father, the Late Hon. George Coles, to the Confederation Conferences at Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa in 1864,” on June 30, 1917.***** It was the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation in 1917, and the First World War was raging. Many thousands of Canadians had been killed, and the now seventy-nine-year-old Mercy Coles may have hoped to lighten the spirits of her fellow Islanders and offer some distraction from the war by recalling long-ago events. She may also have thought it was an opportunity to share her knowledge of the history of Prince Edward Island and her family. She had preserved her diary those many long years, and she didn’t want it to be forgotten.

In this newspaper extract of 1917, Mercy definitely takes more care with what she says than she had in her original accounts. There are significant differences between the newspaper article and the handwritten diary. First, the newspaper account is only an excerpt. Further, there are notable omissions from this newspaper extract, such as how miserable Mercy found Quebec City, and about D’Arcy McGee getting drunk at a dinner. These omissions may have resulted from Mercy censoring herself, or they may have been the product of actions by the editors of the Guardian. Another difference, even though much of the diary is quoted word for word, is the many places in which the events are told in past tense in a type of summary. Again, whether this was done by Mercy Coles herself or the newspaper isn’t known. The result of this summarizing is that the diary loses some of its immediacy and vividness. There are also errors, such as in the name of the hotel in Quebec City at which the Coles family stayed.

Interestingly, there are also additions to the newspaper extract not contained in the handwritten diary, such as the reason why Mercy and her family did not travel to Quebec City on the Queen Victoria, the muddiness of D’Arcy McGee’s riding in Montreal, and the wonderful hotel room John A. Macdonald arranged for her in Montreal. Perhaps these are remembrances or afterthoughts; still, the existence of these additional notes is curious, and one wonders if another version of the diary might exist, and what other extra notes there might be. The newspaper extract is also the only place where Mercy documents the brief tour through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from September 8 to 18 that the delegates and she took after the Charlottetown conference ended on September 8, 1864.

Mercy’s momentous trip was six weeks in length, and the diary entries, ten thousand words long, were written in a small, blue, hardcover book. The entries are often brief, with fleeting references to events, people, and places — they are, to some extent, similar to our social media postings of today. If, however, we pay close attention to Mercy’s writings, and explore them in a deeper way than we would such postings, we can (re)learn what was considered of significance in 1864.

So, pour yourselves a bumper or two (or more) of champagne, have your booster shot for diphtheria, and come along on this Confederation ride.

* No young women from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, or Canada, accompanied their fathers to the Charlottetown conference in September 1864. No doubt the men didn’t view the time in Prince Edward Island (which had nowhere near the opportunities and entertainment that Quebec City had) as an opportunity for their daughters to meet potential husbands. The women of PEI, however, including Mercy Coles and Margaret Gray, were part of the social events at Charlottetown.

** Newfoundland did not take part in the Charlottetown conference, however representatives from there did go to the Quebec conference.

*** It wouldn’t be uncommon then for women to marry in their late twenties, but given Mercy’s situation with her many sisters and no apparent suitor in sight for her, we can see that she was feeling the pressure of time and opportunity.

**** There has been a lot of academic research on the subject of women and the creation of identity through life writing. The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996, edited by Kathryn Carter, Helen M. Buss’s Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English, and Felicity A. Nussbaum’s article “Towards Conceptualizing Diary” in Studies in Autobiography are useful in understanding the area.

***** The full newspaper article is reprinted in the Appendix. As well, much of the additional information has been added and noted as such in the transcription of the full original diary presented here.