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1839–1854

Idleness Is No Pleasure

John A. Macdonald was seriously ill for a time in 1840, and his health continued to cause concern during the next two years. His father’s death, in 1841, added to his family responsibilities, and he was probably working too hard. However, as he remarked during his first overseas holiday, “idleness is no pleasure,” and he planned to return to his career “with greater zest and zeal than ever.” In his mid-twenties, various options loomed: marriage, expansion of his law firm, and maybe a launch into politics, to advance Kingston’s business interests — and his own.

Canada was entering a new political chapter. The British government had decided to unite Upper and Lower Canada into a single province, confident that the predominantly loyal Upper Canadians would control the habitants, who had posed the major challenge to the Empire in 1837–38. Both sections of the new province would have forty-two seats in the joint Assembly, thus overcoming the inconvenient problem that Upper Canada’s 450,000 population — half that of modern Nova Scotia — was 200,000 fewer than that of Lower Canada. However, Montreal, Canada’s largest city at the time, was largely English-speaking, and Anglophones would control about a dozen Lower Canada ridings, ensuring a 5–3 majority of English over French in the united legislature. Responsible government — a Canadian ministry answerable to the local legislature — was ruled out. Rather, the British governor-general would work with the Assembly just as the president of the United States dealt with Congress, persuading it to vote the taxes needed to pay for government and choosing his own Cabinet, irrespective of party. This imperial thinking was deeply flawed. Proclaiming that the Union was intended to subjugate French Canadians (even their language was barred in the legislature) guaranteed that they voted defensively as a national block. Since the rival English-speaking factions continued to squabble, the thirty French votes virtually controlled the Assembly. The French-Canadian leader, Louis LaFontaine, formed an alliance with the Upper Canada Reformers and, within eighteen months, he forced his way into office.

At the first elections in 1841, Macdonald was campaign manager for Kingston’s Conservative candidate, John Forsyth. Since the right to vote depended upon owning property, his legal knowledge was important, and he discharged his task “ably and zealously.” Unfortunately, Forsyth narrowly lost to local businessman, Anthony Manahan. Normally, as an Irish Catholic, Manahan would have been a no-hoper but, in this unusual election, he was seen as the candidate of the governor-general, Lord Sydenham, who had just selected Kingston as capital of the united province. Indeed, when Manahan took a government job soon after, the city dutifully elected Sydenham’s right-hand man, S.B. Harrison.

Early in 1842, John A. Macdonald sailed to England for an energetic convalescence. In London, he attended parliamentary debates, whetting his political appetite by watching the great statesmen of the Empire. A new invention, railways, made travel easy. He visited Queen Victoria’s private apartments at Windsor Castle, toured the Lake District, and looked up relatives in Scotland. He bought law books in London, a ceremonial kilt in Edinburgh, and state-of-the-art kitchen equipment in Manchester. Macdonald had cash to spend partly because of huge winnings in a card game before he left Kingston — an episode that perhaps triggered a row with his mother, because he never gambled again.

There was probably a bigger item on his want list than kitchen equipment: prosperous and twenty-seven, he needed a wife. For a young professional man, finding the right partner was not just a personal choice. Marriages might not be made in heaven, but the couple usually belonged to the same religious denomination. In Kingston, now a town of six thousand people of all ages and many faiths, the range of potential brides was limited. A lawyer’s wife should be a sophisticated lady, but Canada seemed overrun, as Oliver Mowat complained, with “unthinking, unintelligent young women.” Respectable families often imported brides: Macdonald was twice married, but neither partner grew up in Canada.

Although Helen Macdonald was a possessive mother, she could hardly have programmed her adult son to marry his cousin Isabella. But she probably sowed the seed by praising the female Clarks. The capable Maria, who had accompanied the family to Canada, had married a Macpherson and settled locally. Margaret was now a widow in her forties, but two younger sisters still lived with her. Jane had health problems; Isabella was six years John A.’s senior. Helen, who had married a younger man herself, probably brushed that aside. The Clark sisters had left Georgia and, in 1842, were living on the Isle of Man, a Crown dependency in the Irish Sea, where low taxes created a refuge for hard-up gentility. Sending their “warmest love,” they persuaded Macdonald to visit their backwater. There he proposed to Isabella and was accepted. The bride arrived in Kingston the next year, and the couple were married on September 1, 1843: in Scots tradition, the Presbyterian ceremony was held in Maria Macpherson’s drawing room.

Within two years, Isabella’s health and her husband’s career combined to create a serious problem in the marriage, although their mutual affection was obvious. Thanks to their transatlantic courtship, the couple may not have known one another well when they agreed to share their destinies. When they married, Macdonald was twenty-eight, and Isabella thirty-four — an unusual age combination, but not an insuperable barrier in adult years. Perhaps the Clark sisters had visited Maria from Georgia — but when? Ten years previously, Isabella would have been a mature young woman, John a gawky teenage law clerk. Their romantic reunion on the Isle of Man was perhaps their first encounter on equal terms. During their short courtship, Macdonald probably told his fiancée that he hoped to enter the legislature, which then met in Kingston — a few blocks from home. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, Canada’s capital had been transferred to Montreal: Macdonald’s election in 1844 meant long periods of absence. Isabella was no trophy wife, but she perhaps felt herself a captive daughter-in-law, with her ambitious Aunt Helen as her husband’s mother. She recalled her days in Georgia and yearned for space in her part-time marriage.

Soon after Macdonald’s return from Britain, the provincial Parliament met for its second session, in September 1842. The new governor-general, Sir Charles Bagot, accepted arithmetical reality: LaFontaine’s alliance with Robert Baldwin’s Upper Canada Reformers controlled the Assembly and they forced the governor to admit their nominees to his Cabinet. As Bagot wearily concluded, theoretical argument about responsible government was pointless, because “virtually it exists.” In a rearguard action, he retained some existing Cabinet members for their administrative skills, including Kingston’s defender, S.B. Harrison. In 1843, Bagot’s health collapsed, and he was succeeded by Sir Charles Metcalfe. A former governor in India and Jamaica, Metcalfe was used to giving orders, not taking advice. A clash with his Reform ministers was likely, and confrontation would mean elections for a new Assembly. At this point, John A. Macdonald fought his first campaign.

In March 1843, Macdonald was elected as a Kingston alderman. Five months earlier, he had become president of the local St Andrew’s Society, which gave him opportunities to wear his ceremonial kilt, and firm up his support among the Scottish community. He also joined the Orange Order, a Protestant Irish fraternal organization, which in Canada transcended its national origins. Its powerful political machine underpinned his electoral organization in Kingston until the Orangemen quarrelled with him in 1860–61.

Macdonald was elected easily, but it was a fierce campaign. Since property qualifications allowed few men to vote, the excluded majority disrupted political rallies in protest. John A. Macdonald proved a skilled performer, exchanging wisecracks with hecklers until he gained the crowd’s attention, and then launching into a serious speech. At his victory rally, a platform collapsed, plunging him into the snow and he joked about the ups and downs of politics. Forsyth, the Conservative candidate in 1841, had been a halting speaker and was too obviously the privileged product of the local elite. If the party wanted a standard-bearer who could reach out and win votes, this genial self-made lawyer might be the answer.

He became a key player in municipal affairs at a moment of crisis for Kingston. The city had benefited from its selection as Canada’s capital. (The official term was “seat of government”: as part of the Empire, Canada’s true capital was London, England.) The influx of politicians and bureaucrats boosted the local economy, but the newcomers were critical of the city’s poor accommodations, both for people and institutions. The municipality planned a huge city hall for use as Canada’s parliament house — but the real objection to Kingston was not its lack of facilities, but its atmosphere. French-Canadians felt uneasy with its loyalism, Reformers disliked its Toryism. When the new ministers lost an important by-election, Kingston Conservatives (Macdonald included) celebrated so riotously that the legislators felt intimidated. In March 1843, a Cabinet committee recommended moving the capital to Montreal. Harrison tried to block the decision, but in September he admitted defeat and resigned from office. Early in November 1843, the Assembly ratified the move. Three weeks later, Metcalfe forced the Reformers out of office, but it was too late for Kingston. Civil servants had quickly packed their files and hurried downriver.

Having ousted the Reformers, Metcalfe prorogued (i.e., suspended) Parliament to silence their supporters. Although the governor general delayed the call until September 1844, everybody knew that elections would soon follow. Kingston’s Conservatives needed to unite behind an acceptable candidate — but who? The front-runner was probably lawyer John S. Cartwright, son of a founder of Kingston, who already represented a nearby riding. But Cartwright sailed to Britain in March 1844 to plead with the imperial authorities to veto the move to Montreal, a fruitless mission which destroyed his health. Into the vacuum stepped John A. Macdonald.

Years later, Macdonald modestly explained that he was selected to “fill a gap,” adding: “There seemed to be no one else available, so I was pitched upon.” He also recalled that he made it a condition that he might serve only a single term. Perhaps this was a tactical concession to the hereditary claims of Kingston’s first families: in 1873, he recalled that they had distrusted him as “an adventurer” when he broke into politics. In reality, he moved effectively to seize the nomination. In April 1844, 225 Kingston citizens signed a requisition asking him to run — a well-organized show of strength. Macdonald responded by stressing that the signatories included “men of all shades of political opinion,” highlighting his ability to reach out to uncommitted voters. He agreed “to lay aside all personal considerations” and run. Some Tories likely resented giving this upstart a free pass into Parliament for, in September, Macdonald staged a pre-emptive strike. He called a public meeting and asked whether his supporters might “now prefer to select another candidate.” The outcome was a unanimous endorsement, with the intimidating pro-Macdonald chairman, old Jemmy Williamson, practically defying anybody to break ranks. Happily, Williamson did not know that Macdonald had once bricked up his doorway.

In his campaign, Macdonald waved the British flag: “the prosperity of Canada depends upon its permanent connection with the mother country,” implying that Reformers were disloyal. He dismissed “fruitless discussions on abstract and theoretical questions of government,” insisting that, as “a young country,” Canada should “develop its resources.” He backed schemes such as a plank road to the Ottawa Valley, to “make Kingston the market for a large and fertile, though hitherto valueless country.” There was no hidden bonanza waiting in Kingston’s rocky hinterland but, decades later, Macdonald would push Canada’s westward expansion with equal optimism.

He emphasized his local credentials, promising “to advance the interests of the town in which I have lived so long and with whose fortunes my own prosperity is linked.” For John A. Macdonald, politics was an extension of business. On September 1, 1843 — by whimsical coincidence, his wedding day — he signed a three-year partnership agreement with Alexander Campbell. Campbell would run the law office while Macdonald worked for Kingston in Parliament. Over the next two decades, Macdonald secured charters for twenty-five local projects, one of which, the Trust and Loan Company, a farm mortgage bank founded in 1843, would become a mainstay of his income. When he proclaimed that it was “alike my duty and my interest to promote the prosperity of this city and the adjacent country,” John A. Macdonald meant what he said.

There was another, unstressed, plank in his campaign. Macdonald ran as a Protestant candidate against the Catholic, Anthony Manahan, claiming that he would be “hard run by the Papishes,” a mildly offensive nickname for Manahan’s Irish supporters. In fact, Macdonald won handily, by 275 votes to forty-two. However, he had lost the straw vote taken at the “hustings,” the rowdy public nomination meeting, in which anybody could take part. In his early election campaigns, he invariably lost on the hustings but went on to triumph among the qualified voters: as the franchise widened, so his majorities fell. John A. Macdonald was elected by Kingston elite, not by the Kingston masses — but the bank clerk’s son had shouldered his way to prominence. The riding might not remain as rock-solid as it appeared.

For Helen Macdonald, as she proudly watched the new member for Kingston board the steamer to Montreal, her son’s election to Parliament likely closed the quarter-century of humiliation caused by her husband’s bankruptcy in Glasgow. But Macdonald’s wife was absent from the dockside. Life was going badly for Isabella, and we must probe the mystery of her health. We hear her voice from just two surviving letters, both probably written under heavy medication: “my head is very confused, & I am not sure what I say,” she confessed in one of them. Some male historians have implied that she was a selfish airhead whose hysterical self-pity dragged down her husband’s career —even driving him to drink. However, Isabella Macdonald suffered real pain, likely caused by trigeminal neuralgia, pressure on the facial nerve from enlarged blood vessels that causes a stabbing pain in the face. Often called the “tic” (the name Macdonald used), the condition interferes with normal activities, such as eating, sleeping, and kissing. In Isabella’s case, it sometimes produced total physical collapse. Driven to desperate remedies, she became dependent upon pain-killing opium. Even if perhaps she manipulated her condition to gain control over her own life, her agonies were genuine. Macdonald’s sister Margaret reported Isabella’s “inability to take care of herself,” adding that “poor John however willing” was “nearly as useless as a child” in looking after her.

In the summer of 1844 the Macdonalds had vacationed at New Haven, Connecticut. Isabella was not only determined to return the following year but also to spend the 1845–46 winter in Georgia, although a severe attack in July left her so exhausted that a Kingston doctor feared she would die. “It may be days — nay weeks — before she has rallied sufficiently to attempt any journey,” Macdonald wrote despairingly. But Isabella aimed to get as far away from Canada as possible, and for as long as she could. Within a week of the crisis, she was carried to the Oswego steamboat and the couple started across Lake Ontario for New England. Her exhaustion was so “dreadful” that Macdonald feared his wife “would die on the deck.” Yet, “strange to say her health and strength seemed to return” the further she travelled from Kingston. In October, Macdonald escorted her on the harrowing journey south. Even though Isabella was carried everywhere, exhaustion often forced her “to have recourse to opium.” However, she indomitably insisted on pressing on: Isabella was not the weak heroine of melodrama. Fond of wordplay, Macdonald called her a “Shero,” who “manfully” resisted her affliction. It took three weeks to reach Savannah, where he enjoyed his first taste of peach brandy, but early in December he had to return to Canada.

Macdonald left his wife behind at a time when the United States threatened war against Britain. On December 2, 1845, President James K. Polk aggressively demanded that the British clear out of the Pacific Northwest, the fur-trading region hitherto shared between the two countries. He also insisted that there must be “no future European colony or dominion … planted or established on any part of the North American continent.” The Oregon crisis was resolved by dividing the territory along the forty-ninth parallel, but for several months there was a danger that Isabella would be stranded behind enemy lines. From Kingston in February 1846, Macdonald forlornly hoped his wife “may yet be restored to me, in health, strength and spirits.” In fact, Isabella would be absent from Canada for three years.

If the new member for Kingston was risking his domestic happiness to sit in Parliament, he displayed a surprisingly low political profile, hardly speaking during his first two sessions. Macdonald entered Parliament at a toxic moment. Governor Metcalfe’s narrow election victory was almost entirely based upon an English-Canadian majority. The result was a divided country and a weak government. John A. Macdonald spent the next decade learning the lessons of 1844. Ironically, Metcalfe’s victory had proved Bagot’s point: arguing over responsible government was pointless, for Canada was now governed by the dominant grouping in the Assembly. W.H. Draper, the governor-general’s right-hand man, was effectively premier. Draper’s precarious ministry needed Macdonald’s vote, not his voice.

Keen to promote the interests of Kingston, John A. Macdonald avoided making enemies. Indeed, his most serious clash was with an arch-Tory, W.H. Boulton, who threatened him with a duel for allegedly slandering his family dynasty. (Duelling was going out of fashion, so it was safe to issue the threat.) In 1846, Macdonald secured a charter making Kingston a city, but his main interest was his mortgage business. The Trust and Loan Company’s plan to lend money to farmers was hampered by Canada’s Usury Laws, which capped interest rates. Well-intentioned but short-sighted, the Usury Laws gave Canadians no incentive to save, and made the province unattractive to overseas investors. Macdonald’s strategy was to bypass the obstacle, by seeking an exemption permitting his own company to charge higher rates — which he eventually achieved in 1850.

“I like to steer my own course,” Macdonald assured his family, but he was ambitious for office. As the danger of war with the United States receded, so a new threat to Canada came from Britain itself. Late in 1845, the imperial government announced the end of the Corn Laws, the preferential tariff that enabled Canadian farmers to export their wheat to Britain at lower import duties than their American rivals. Cheap bread was needed to stave off revolution in Britain’s booming industrial towns and among the starving people of Ireland. In effect, Britain turned to the United States for its food. The repeal of the Corn Laws was followed by the end of protection on timber. In Canada, farmers, millers, loggers, and ship-owners faced ruin. Some feared Britain might abandon Canada altogether. The province needed ambitious politicians who would develop its resources.

In June 1846, Premier Draper decided he needed a minister with “activity of mind and familiar with business details” to clean up Canada’s inefficient land-granting agency: Macdonald was the obvious choice. The governor general shared Draper’s “very high opinion” of the thirty-one-year-old member for Kingston. Unfortunately, his appointment was prevented by the venomous split between Tories and moderate Conservatives, “selfishness” versus “patriotism” in Draper’s vocabulary. Forced to appease the diehards, he appointed the even younger John Hillyard Cameron instead. Toronto and privilege had shouldered aside the self-made lawyer from Kingston. For twenty years, Cameron remained Macdonald’s rival in the Conservative party.

Macdonald made his ambitions clear when he renewed his law partnership with Alexander Campbell in September 1846 for a further three years. Campbell received a larger share of the profits — and would be paid still more if Macdonald accepted political office. In December, Draper made Macdonald a Queen’s Counsel. This promotion to senior legal rank allowed him to charge higher fees, and to use a junior barrister — Campbell of course — as his gopher in court cases. If Macdonald quit Parliament, he would have gained something from his time in politics. If he stayed, he was marked out as a potential attorney-

general (justice minister). An angry Toronto newssheet denounced his elevation as “another deep insult offered to the Canadian people”: the mottoes “corruption” and “incapacity” should be sewn on his new silk gown. The twice-weekly Globe was a minor nuisance, run by a young Scotsman called George Brown. Brown belonged to a breakaway Presbyterian church which delighted in denouncing sinners — a strategy incompatible with building political alliances. But, within a decade, the Globe became the most powerful newspaper in Upper Canada and Brown’s the loudest voice in the Reform party — with Macdonald the special target for his venom.

Macdonald perhaps never saw the Globe’s first attack on him. His wife had travelled north from Georgia but was still reluctant to return to Kingston. The couple arranged to celebrate Christmas 1846 in New York, and celebrate they certainly did. Isabella soon discovered that, at the age of thirty-seven, she was expecting her first child: in her weakened state, she might not survive childbirth. Although pregnancies were managed by female relatives, Macdonald briefly considered dropping out of Parliament. However, he decided to return to Montreal for “the last act of my short political career,” a renewed attack on the bigoted Tories who made the Conservative party “stink in the nostrils of all liberal minded people.” In fact, he was appointed to Cabinet. He claimed to be “quite taken by surprise,” but Draper’s comment — “Your turn has come at last” — suggests Macdonald had pressed his claims. The new governor general, Lord Elgin, described Macdonald as “a person of consideration” among the moderate Conservatives whose appointment would strengthen the ministry. Critics pointed to his lack of experience and his low profile in Parliament: the Globe loftily dismissed him as “harmless,” a judgment it soon revised.

Becoming a Cabinet minister at thirty-two was an achievement. Office-holders were styled “Honourable” for life: he was now the Hon. John A. Unfortunately, Macdonald had joined a failing government. Elections were due and, since Lord Elgin was under orders from Britain to be neutral, the Conservatives had no chance of repeating their narrow victory of 1844. As Macdonald recalled years later, “we went to a general election knowing well that we should be defeated.” But for a young politician, it is a good long-term investment to join a government facing defeat: in the opposition years that follow, the novice can grow into a party heavyweight. Both Laurier and Mackenzie King founded their future careers on joining short-lived Cabinets.

Macdonald was appointed receiver-general, responsible for collecting government revenue. However, the only proposal that he put to Parliament dealt with university funding. His scheme planned to split funds allocated for higher education among four small Church-run colleges, which together catered for only a few dozen students. Macdonald’s interest in the issue probably reflected his own regrets at his incomplete education. Dividing the funds appealed to his sense of fairness, although it helped that two of the four beneficiaries, Presbyterian Queen’s and Catholic Regiopolis, were located in Kingston. Unfortunately, Macdonald’s compromise collapsed when the Tories demanded all the money for the Anglicans.