Читать книгу The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle - Ged Martin - Страница 10

1872–1877

John A. Beats the Devil

Following his narrow victory in the 1872 election, Macdonald’s priority was the Pacific Railway project. Neither Allan’s election contributions nor Macpherson’s testimonial fund influenced his judgment. Although Macpherson refused to merge with his rival, the contract went to Allan on Macdonald’s terms: the Montreal entrepreneur dumped his American backers and formed the required all-Canadian company. In December, Macdonald assured Mail editor Patteson that “we have no rocks ahead for the next session.” Unfortunately, Allan’s American friends were outraged at their abandonment: they felt they had bought Allan, Allan had bought the election, and they wanted a slice of the contract. Macdonald rebuffed them, so they turned to the opposition. On April 2, 1873, a Liberal MP, L.S. Huntington, charged that the Pacific Railway project had been sold for election funds. Macdonald was able to reject the allegation by a thirty-one vote majority but, seven months later, Canada’s first prime minister resigned in disgrace.

The “Pacific Scandal” (or “Slander” as Macdonald called it) was drawn out in instalments, each fresh wave of revelations fostering the impression of deeper corruption. The government prudently conceded a parliamentary committee but technical difficulties over its enquiry powers spurred paranoid accusations of a double-cross. On July 4, Huntington released Allan’s correspondence with his American backers, carefully edited to increase its impact. Two weeks later, the Globe and the Montreal Herald published embarrassing documents stolen from the office of Allan’s solicitor, J.J.C. Abbott (who would succeed Macdonald as prime minister in 1891). This scoop included the telegram from Macdonald to Allan begging for election funds: “I must have another ten thousand.” In August, the prime minister established a three-person Royal Commission, with sweeping powers of investigation, but protecting himself by appointing J.R. Gowan, who was noted for his “friendship, almost amounting to affection, for Sir John A. Macdonald.” The commission heard evidence throughout September, with Macdonald personally cross-examining witnesses. There was no formal proof of corruption, but plenty of sleazy detail about how elections were financed. For months, the government was constantly on the defensive.

The scandal was especially damaging because it could be reduced to a simple issue: even schoolchildren abused the Conservatives as “Charter-sellers.” It also coincided with technical improvements in printing which effectively introduced political cartooning to Canada. The satirical magazine Grip, launched in May 1873, found Macdonald’s huge nose and wild hair an easy target for caricature: a child in the street once pointed him out as “the bad man in Grip.” The Royal Commission was portrayed as three smirking Macdonalds. The prime minister was shown scattering pledges in a drunken spree, and haughtily stating, “I took the money and bribed the electors with it. Is there anything wrong with that?” That charge was unfair: he had begged election funds to pay campaign expenses not to bribe voters, although at ground level the difference was perhaps slight. However, even Macdonald acknowledged that his dealings with Allan looked bad. In England, the two parties raised election funds through arm’s-length organizations, so that Disraeli and Gladstone, the Empire’s great statesmen, never knew who financed their campaigns; in Canada, the party leader was his own bagman. As the October meeting of Parliament approached, the governor general, Lord Dufferin, warned Macdonald that his dealings with Allan “cannot but fatally affect your position as minister.”

Macdonald alternated between denial and oblivion. In June, 1873, he suggested to his Cabinet colleagues that he should resign, “his idea being to keep them in office from the back benches” but, as Dufferin commented, “his Government would not last a day without him.” His colleagues thought so too. “They almost told me that if I would not fight it out with them, they would not fight at all,” he recalled. “I gave in.” He retreated on vacation to Rivière-du-Loup. Alarmed by rumours of a breaking story, T.C. Patteson travelled from Toronto to ask Macdonald how the Mail should respond to opposition charges. “He laughed and said they knew nothing to tell.” On his return journey, Patteson saw the “$10,000” telegram scoop in the Globe. “I felt very angry with Sir John A. for having deceived me.”

In fact, Macdonald feared that the opposition knew too much. In May, “terribly over worked and harassed,” he went on a binge. In June, the governor general reported a “very distressing and pitiable” discussion, in which the two men confirmed a death sentence on a woman who had killed her abusive husband — his hangover, her hanging. Early in August, Dufferin reported that “Sir John has been constantly drinking during the last month” and “in a terrible state for some time past.” For a few days nobody — Agnes included — knew his whereabouts, and a story circulated that he had tried to drown himself in the St. Lawrence at Rivière-du-Loup. Macdonald would later cite the tale as evidence of his enemies’ dishonesty, but perhaps it reflected some alcoholic episode of desperate self-harm. He was certainly behaving like somebody with a guilty conscience.

Two deaths in London, England — one of a colleague and the other of a project — added to his problems. Cartier had travelled to Britain to seek last-ditch medical treatment for his shattered health, and died there in May 1873. Macdonald was devastated, although his claim that they had “never had a serious difference” during their two-decade partnership was a pious exaggeration. As Dufferin noted, Allan was now “at liberty to make any statement he may please” about Cartier’s alleged promises. But Allan, also in England, found himself presiding over the institutional funeral. His Pacific Railway needed British investment, but London financiers were distrustful of the scheme’s murky aura. In October 1873, Allan admitted failure and surrendered his charter. Macdonald had nothing to show for the stench of the Pacific Scandal.

Even so, many believed the government could still survive when Parliament began debating Mackenzie’s censure motion on October 27. “Macdonald’s hold upon the affection of the people is very strong,” Dufferin had noted. “Personally he is very popular, even among his opponents.” Canadians believed that “the Dominion owes its existence” to Macdonald’s “skill, talent and statesmanship.” If he had spoken early in the debate, some said he would have won by at least ten votes. But having begun the session well, “after two or three days the strain became too much for him” and he took to drink, ignoring “the angry entreaties of his friends.” In a formal debate, MPs could speak only once. Macdonald wanted to reply to the leading opposition orator, Edward Blake, “but — calculating on the effect of his physical infirmities breaking his adversary down — Blake determined to hold back.” Privately, Macdonald feared the disclosure of some further incriminating document. Meanwhile, as an Ottawa diarist put it, “‘ratting’ goes on daily” as MPs fell away “like autumn leaves.” Agnes broke gender restrictions to lobby one wavering government supporter, but he “ratted” too.

By the time Macdonald spoke, on November 3, his reticence seemed an admission of guilt. Pale and frail from exhaustion and booze, he nonetheless delivered a five-hour oration. A Cabinet colleague was persuaded to pass him glasses of neat gin, a transparent spirit that conveniently resembles water: it was said that Macdonald had two more suppliers, none of them knowing of the others’ existence. For once, alcohol proved not a handicap but a fuel, for he closed with a dignified peroration. “I have fought the battle of Confederation,” he claimed, as he looked beyond the parliamentary vote to the judgment of the people and the verdict of history. Nobody had “given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, such as they may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.” It was an electrifying finale, but they were the words of a beaten politician.

Four days later, Alexander Campbell complained that “had Sir John A[.] kept straight during the last fortnight, the Ministry would not have been defeated.” Dufferin regarded Macdonald’s “physical infirmity” as “a source of intolerable embarrassment at every turn, for unfortunately it is when affairs are at a crisis that it overtakes him.” But the alcohol problem was only a symptom. Fundamentally, the crisis stemmed from Macdonald’s failure to win a strong majority in 1872. He had hoped that the six recently arrived MPs from Prince Edward Island, Canada’s newest province, would support the government that now ruled their destinies. The Islanders reviewed the political situation — and four of them joined the opposition. On November 4, the influential Manitoba MP Donald A. Smith sought an interview. Smith had proved a wise negotiator during the Red River troubles, but Macdonald disliked him and agreed to the meeting reluctantly. After twenty minutes, Smith stalked out, complaining that Macdonald had “done nothing but curse and swear at me.” Smith “ratted” that evening. Next day, November 5, 1873, the government resigned, with Macdonald putting his characteristic “spin” on the disaster that most believed would end his career. “I have long yearned for rest and am not sorry to have it forced on me,” he assured Gowan. “I believe Canada will do me justice in the long run.” As Alexander Mackenzie formed the new government, Liberal MPs celebrated by singing their own version of Clementine: “Sir John is dead and gone for ever.” But was he?

The five years that John A. Macdonald spent in opposition are dismissed by his admirers as a blip that the voters corrected after enduring the inadequate Mackenzie Liberals. In fact, that period divided into three phases. The first, one of wild and ill-advised activity, crashed after four months with a Conservative rout in a snap general election. The second, from 1874 to 1876, plunged Macdonald’s life into its deepest trough. The third saw him solve both personal and political challenges, overcoming his alcohol problem and rebuilding his party to return to office in 1878.

Tactically, Macdonald should have adopted a low profile after his resignation. Mackenzie encountered problems hammering disparate factions into a Cabinet. Luther Holton, the party’s finance expert, refused the portfolio, which went to Richard Cartwright, the former Conservative outraged by the appointment of Hincks (“and now you see the company he has got into,” sneered Macdonald). Two other prominent Liberals, Edward Blake from Ontario and A.-A. Dorion from Quebec, soon resigned. Mackenzie would have called (and won) an early election anyway, but initially he planned a short parliamentary session to clean up election laws. This would have highlighted the inexperience of the new ministers, only three of whom had previously held political office, two of them very briefly. Renewing his proclaimed opposition strategy of 1862–63, Macdonald promised to “subordinate Party to Country.” In reality, he seemed to be planning to repeat the ambush that had destroyed George Brown in 1858. This was a tactical blunder which gave Mackenzie the excuse to go to the polls immediately.

One clue to Macdonald’s intentions only surfaced four years later. As prime minister, he had personally administered Canada’s secret service fund. With casual arrogance, he omitted to inform Mackenzie that he still controlled its $32,000 balance. By the time Macdonald wound up the fund in 1875, another $6,000 had been disbursed for purposes, as Mackenzie grumbled, “of which he constituted himself the sole judge.” Protesting that “not one farthing of the money was ever in my hands,” Macdonald insisted he could not name the recipients without endangering them. Hence Ontario Protestants never discovered that the fund had been used to bribe Louis Riel to get out of Manitoba.

Far from radiating dignified humility, Macdonald defiantly accepted a banquet in his honour just one week after his resignation. He was led through the Ottawa streets by a band, playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” “Can I believe my senses?” he asked the assembled throng. “Am I a defeated man or am I a victorious minister?” Dismissing the Pacific Scandal charges against him as “unjust … foul and unfair,” he predicted that his party would soon return to office, but hoped he would “never be a member of any administration again.” He gave contradictory signals. “I cannot last much longer.… But I will remain as long as I can of any service.” Conservatives would find younger leaders, whom “you will be proud to follow with the same constancy as you have followed me.” In an era before party conventions and mass memberships, it is hard to see how this new leadership could emerge, especially while Macdonald remained in place. The shell-shocked caucus had re-elected him as leader: nobody else wanted the job.

Mackenzie’s new ministers faced the usual by-elections, and most were returned by acclamation. But Macdonald denounced the “ingratitude, and base treachery” of his former acolyte, Cartwright. Insultingly, the new finance minister sent Macdonald a forty dollar cheque for travelling expenses so that they could debate face to face: Macdonald, of course, never cashed it. At the ensuing confrontation, Cartwright, who was handily re-elected, tried to goad Macdonald into punching him as he had assaulted Carruthers at Kingston. A second by-election resulted from a last-minute Macdonald patronage appointment, which opened the strong Tory riding of West Toronto. Just before Christmas 1873, the 1,043 to 574 Conservative majority of 1872 was turned around into a 1,577 to 1,066 Liberal triumph.

Now confident of victory, Mackenzie capitalized on West Toronto to call an immediate general election. In February 1874 the Conservatives were reduced to sixty-seven MPs in the 206-seat House of Commons. In some respects, Macdonald’s party did surprisingly well. In Ontario, although thirteen Liberals were returned by acclamation, the Conservatives polled almost half the votes across the contested ridings, a good base for a comeback. However, they retained only twenty-two seats in the province: Macdonald himself won Kingston by just thirty-eight votes, and was promptly hit by a petition to unseat him for corruption. His own government had tightened election laws so that candidates could be disqualified even if they were conveniently ignorant of corrupt actions by supporters — and the petition alleged seventy-one of them! If barred from representing Kingston, Macdonald would have found it hard to find another riding — and he might even have been disqualified from sitting in Parliament altogether. When the case was heard in November 1873, he attempted damage limitation, acknow-ledging that “indiscreet” expenditure by his campaign manager, Alexander Campbell, rendered his election invalid. Campbell had prudently decamped to the United States and could not be summoned to give evidence. The manoeuvre saved Macdonald from outright disqualification, but he had to contest Kingston again, scraping in by seventeen votes.

Sir John A. Macdonald’s career had now reached his lowest point. Reviewing the political scene in March 1874, Lord Dufferin thought it tragic that Macdonald’s “creditable” public service “should have ended in such humiliation.” Macdonald himself seemed unsure of his future. “My fighting days are over, I think,” he told Tupper. But at about the same time, he gave the journalist N.F. Davin a lively sketch of the future transcontinental Canada, adding “in his own emphatic way,” “That is the time when I should like to lead.”

During 1874–75, the disorganized Conservatives barely offered any opposition in the House of Commons — although they used their Senate numbers to block Mackenzie’s railway deal with the irate British Columbians. Macdonald was refocusing his life away from Ottawa. He had already moved his law practice to Toronto, the main office of its principal client, the Trust and Loan Company. In September 1874 he decided to work there himself, although he kept secret that “I intend to fix my Habitat away from Kingston” until he had won his by-election. “I had to go to work at my trade and earn my living in Toronto,” he recalled a decade later.

Macdonald’s son Hugh had joined the firm, but the opportunity to reunite the family went badly wrong. A likeable young man, Hugh urged his father in 1874 to leave the bulk of his property to his handicapped half-sister Mary, “simply giving me a trifle to show that I have not been cut off for bad behaviour.” But father and son soon quarrelled over Hugh’s plans to marry — probably because his bride was a Catholic. Protesting that Macdonald was “unnecessarily harsh,” Hugh struck out on his own although, characteristically, he insisted that he could “never forget the numbers of kindnesses done and favours conferred upon me in times past.” Happily, the breach was soon healed.

The move to practising law in Toronto confirmed the impression that Macdonald was only a caretaker leader, waiting for a replacement to appear. But when he was challenged, in September 1875, he refused to disappear. Announcing that Macdonald’s re-election as party leader had been a “grave mistake,” Alexander Galt offered to lead a new party. It was a typically inept move by an impulsive personality. Galt had not mobilized any supporters: indeed, he was not even in Parliament at the time. Macdonald easily brushed aside the challenge. The humiliated Galt soon begged to resume friendly relations. “The wound may be considered as healed over,” Macdonald stiffly replied, “but the scar will … remain for some time.” A second by-election in West Toronto (whose Liberal MP had become a judge) in November 1875 returned the riding to its natural allegiance. Macdonald then delivered a fiery speech in Montreal, proving himself still the undisputed leader of the Conservative party, even if it was going nowhere. In June 1877, he announced that he would hold the job “until my friends say that I have served long enough.” He even nominated the abrasive Tupper as his successor, thereby ensuring that nobody would ask him to go.

Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, 1871. He survived a haphazard upbringing and a quarrel with his father to become a Winnipeg lawyer.

Courtesy of Topley Studio/Library and Archives Canada/PA-025352.

One problem in Macdonald’s life remained as serious as ever: he was drinking too much and too often. “If ever there was a man in low water,” the journalist W.F. Maclean recalled, “it was Sir John as I saw him one day in the winter of 1875.” He watched Macdonald “tottering” down Parliament Hill, “others passing him with a wide sweep.” There was an embarrassing episode in the House of Commons one February evening that year: the Mail’s Ottawa correspondent attempted “to veil the facts” in his report, but Macdonald’s “condition was well known.” Mackenzie deplored Macdonald’s “vehement language” and there was “intense anger” among Conservative MPs. A few days later, Mackenzie dismissed another late-night tirade with the comment that Macdonald “appeared to be speaking under some unusual excitement.” In 1876, while on a speaking tour of western Ontario with Charles Tupper, he stayed at Patteson’s hobby farm near Ingersoll. “Sir John got very drunk at dinner” and insulted Tupper, driving Agnes to walk out in protest. “She had a good deal to put up with,” Patteson recalled.

There are many legends of “John A. drunk” but, by definition, “John A. beating the bottle” generated few anecdotes. Yet, in the mid-1870s, Macdonald overcame his alcohol problem. In May 1877, Lord Dufferin noted that he “could drink wine at dinner without being tempted to excess, which hitherto he has never been able to do.” Macdonald survived the 1877 session without a single binge. In 1878, when he fell asleep during an all-night debate, Conservative MPs queued up to denounce the Globe’s allegation that he was “drunk in the plain ordinary sense of that word” — denials they had never dared offer before. Joseph Pope, Macdonald’s secretary from 1883, insisted that the problem was resolved “long before I knew him.” In 1884, a British statesman called Macdonald “a singular instance of a successful man of great ability and industry who is subject to fits of drunkenness” but added: “I believe he has been more sober lately.” Shattered by grief at her mother’s death in 1875, Agnes had persuaded Macdonald to join the Anglican Church, another landmark in distancing himself from his Scottish heritage. However, it was digestion, not religion, which triggered reformation. Macdonald told Dufferin that “his constitution has quite changed of late,” implying that his metabolism could no longer cope with alcohol. Had he failed to tackle the problem, Macdonald could hardly have achieved another dozen years as Canada’s prime minister.

In 1876, almost by accident, the Conservative party found both the new policy and the fresh organizational base needed to win elections. Coming into office in 1873, the Liberals were doubly unlucky: the high-spending Macdonald government bequeathed them a deficit and the world economy took a downturn. The Mackenzie years became associated with gloomy recession, and Macdonald was tempted to adopt a magic-wand policy to get the country moving again. The inspiring idea, called the National Policy, was tariff protection, using duties on imports to create jobs in Canada. Its adoption as a key party plank meant rejecting an intellectual consensus, imported from Britain, in favour of free trade. As the world’s leading industrial power, the British preached the virtues of the level playing field, importing food and raw materials duty-free, or imposing low tariffs that made no distinction by country of origin. In Britain, free trade had become what we now call “politically correct”: it was not only stupid but wicked to support protection — and British intellectual hegemony dominated Canadian discourse. Free trade, Macdonald complained in 1876, had become not just a religion but a superstition: Liberal contributions to economic debate consisted of “long quotations from political economists.”

However beautiful free trade theory, it did not fit Canadian circumstances. Four million Canadians lived alongside forty million Americans, who ruthlessly used tariffs to develop their own industries. In 1874, George Brown, Mackenzie’s special envoy, negotiated a draft Reciprocity Treaty in Washington, to replace the agreement the Americans had killed in 1866. The pact provided for cross-border free trade in both natural products and manufactures, but the U.S. Senate contemptuously refused even to put it to the vote. As the continental recession set in, American manufacturers treated Canada as a “sacrifice” or “slaughter” market, dumping their overstocks at cheap prices, sacrificing their profits but slaughtering their Canadian competitors. As Macdonald said in 1876, “we have played that conciliatory game long enough”: Canadians should treat Americans “as they treat us.”

There was a second reason why, as Macdonald had argued as far back as 1860, it was “useless to discuss the abstract principles of Free Trade and Protection” in Canada. Britain had a broad revenue base, raising government cash from goods and services taxes and income tax. These were abominations to Canadians: they only succumbed to income tax under wartime pressure in 1917, while potential revenue-raising areas such as tavern licences belonged to the provinces. Hence the Dominion derived about sixty percent of its income from import duties — double the proportion in Britain. “We must trust to our customs, therefore, as the principal source of our future revenue,” Macdonald stated in 1876. Britain could afford free trade; Canada could not.

Canada’s over-reliance upon import duties caused problems in funding the government when trade fell off. In 1874, Finance Minister Cartwright raised the overall tariff to 17.5 percent, so that anybody importing $100 of foreign goods paid $117.50 for them. But, as doctrinaire free traders, the Liberals refused to vary the rates to help Canadian producers. However, back in 1858, Macdonald’s provincial ministry had experimented with a different approach. As he explained, “we took off the duties on the necessaries of life which the poor man uses … we increased those on articles of luxury, which the rich man buys” and “we raised the taxation on those goods which our own mechanics can manufacture … to give them incidental protection.” “Incidental protection” became a coded term: free trade might be best in theory but, since Canada had to operate a revenue tariff, it should be tweaked to help Canadian producers.

The 1876 budget proved the turning point. Cartwright surprised Parliament by leaving the tariff unchanged. When the debate began, Macdonald refused to discuss “the merits of protection and free trade.” However, one week later, he declared that Canada should “so adjust our tariff for revenue purposes … to develop our resources, the duties falling upon the articles we ourselves are capable of producing.” Mackenzie sarcastically congratulated him on finding “a resting place which he may call a policy.” If everybody was to be protected, Mackenzie argued, nobody would gain. “If, on the other hand, only certain classes are to be protected, I want to know what the classes are.”

Of course, Macdonald, the skilled political operator, responded by hinting to every interest group that their products would receive protection, while their essential supplies would be imported duty-free. New Brunswicker Peter Mitchell ran in the 1878 election on the assurance that a Conservative government would impose no tariff on flour, a vital commodity in a timber province that grew very little of its own food. In mid-campaign, news broke that Macdonald had promised Ontario millers that he would tax American flour, and Mitchell lost his election. “I couldn’t help it,” Macdonald pleaded. “I was sincere when I told you what I did.” In a catch-all formula, the Conservatives offered “a judicious readjustment of the tariff” to “foster the agricultural, the mining, the manufacturing and other interests of the Dominion,” prevent emigration, restore prosperity, and force the Americans to grant Reciprocity. Sir John A. was expert at making people believe he would deliver what they wanted. As Lord Dufferin noted, Macdonald charmed politicians from Canada’s discontented Pacific province with promises that under the Conservatives, “every man in British Columbia should have a branch railway at his own door.”

Macdonald wrapped the transcontinental railway into the National Policy package: the railway would fill the West with settlers, who would become customers for central Canadian factories. He nicknamed it “N.P.” — sometimes whimsically interpreted as “no poverty” or “new potatoes” — arguing that it would build a cross-class alliance of factory workers, farmers, and capitalists. Macdonald had targeted working men since 1872, when newspaperman George Brown had reacted to the formation of a printers’ union by having its leaders imprisoned for conspiracy. Finance Minister Cartwright insisted that Canadians must “atone” for previous extravagance by “thrift and hard work;” Macdonald offered them hope. Cartwright warned that the recession was “no time for experiments”; Macdonald poked fun at “a Reform Government with nothing to reform.”

Macdonald’s almost accidental adoption of protection was followed by the equally fortuitous discovery of a new form of political campaigning. On July 1, 1876, he addressed hundreds of Dominion Day vacationers at a picnic at Uxbridge, sixty kilometres northeast of Toronto. A massive success, the picnic was the first in a series of outdoor extravaganzas through the summer months of 1876 and 1877, held across Ontario and even into the English-speaking Eastern Townships of Quebec. Privately, he called them “infernal things,” but they contributed powerfully to the John A. Macdonald legend. Unlike political meetings, which were generally all-male and potentially rowdy, picnics were family occasions for fun, friendship, and flirtation. In this benign environment, Macdonald mobilized his famous charm, shrugging off the Pacific Scandal with the plaintive protest that “he had worked for thirty years, and yet had not amassed wealth.” He exploited the presence of women, assuring the farmer’s wife that protection would help her sell eggs from her henhouse in the factory towns which, like those railways in British Columbia, would spring up in everybody’s neighbourhood.

Macdonald looks sad as he faces the 1878 election. Was his career a failure?

His magic touch as a speaker was captured by one observer, writing in 1883 after Macdonald had returned to office. “Sometimes, by a familiar word or two, you see him levelling distinctions between himself and the audience.” As a result, all those present — farmers, labourers, tradesmen — “feel that they and the prime-minister are assembled there on a common mission — the prime-minister only happens to be prime minister, and speaking then; anyone else, also, might have been.” Yet gradually, the crowd realized “that the speaker is the man who is doing their work the best.” Macdonald broke down barriers between himself and his hearers: “the I is lost in the we.” In 1876–77, when it still seemed unlikely that he would return to office, he varied the theme, praising audiences for their disinterested support for a politician who might never reward them. “How was it, he sometimes asked himself, that he without means, power or patronage … should be so received?” he mused, praising the “British fair play” of Brockville picnickers in 1877.

Macdonald’s critics claimed that he built up support networks by handing out jobs, and he was certainly ruthless in manipulating expectations of patronage, which often remained unfulfilled. But he could never have amassed the 133,633 votes he won across Ontario in 1878, and the still larger number in the rest of Canada, purely by dangling individual favours. If anything, the reverse was true: Macdonald inspired fervent support among people who felt nobly patriotic simply because they idolized “John A.” “There was nothing that his followers would not do or suffer for him,” and this devotion was “strong among those who had never even seen him.” But, in their turn, those dedicated and high-minded supporters felt entitled to rebuke and correct their leader for his human failings. “It is not because you are deemed faultless that this large Assembly has met to do you honour,” Macdonald was told at Simcoe in 1876. Modern spin-doctors would be horrified at riding officials telling their leader that “if you erred in the administration of affairs your errors were of judgment and not of intention.” However, Macdonald humbly accepted the reprimand, confessing to “acts of omission and commission which I regret” but consoling himself that his supporters accepted that “I was acting … for the interest of our common country.” Most politicians are judged by their deeds rather than their intentions: John A. Macdonald led a charmed life as a special exception.

Reviewing the political scene at the close of 1877, the Montreal Gazette noted that the picnics had raised Macdonald’s popularity to levels “few people could have anticipated,” and predicted that he would “sweep the country” at the upcoming general election. The claim, even from a friendly newspaper, would hardly have been credible two years earlier. One Conservative supporter who had mixed feelings about the come-back was the leader’s wife, who had spent the past two years home-making in Toronto. Agnes had to tread carefully. “My lord and master … simply lives to please and gratify me” at home, but Macdonald was “absolutely tyrannical in his public life,” snubbing her if she commented on political matters. In July 1878, she plucked up courage to ask whether the forthcoming election would take them back to Ottawa. “If we do well, we shall have a majority of sixty,” he replied; “if badly, forty.”

Canadians voted on September 17, 1878. On election night, veteran Liberal Luther Holton watched as telegrams flooded into a Montreal newsroom announcing a Conservative sweep — not by forty, nor sixty, but a majority of eighty seats. Eventually, Holton broke his silence with the comment: “Well! John A. beats the devil.” Macdonald had certainly vanquished two personal demons: he had overcome his alcohol problem, and his election victory drew a line under the humiliating Pacific Scandal. One setback clouded the victory: after thirty-three years as their MP, Macdonald was rejected in Kingston as the “Do-Nothing Deserter” who had moved to Toronto. He was quickly elected as absentee member for Victoria in British Columbia. Campbell consoled him, “if you were defeated in Kingston, you have been elected by the Dominion.”