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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.

Macdonald then rushed to New York for the birth of his son. Isabella suffered so much that her obstetrician tried a risky new treatment: she became one of the first women in the world to have the benefit of anaesthesia in childbirth, a process only pioneered a few months earlier. The technique was still so experimental that the medical team would not risk making Isabella unconscious in case they could not revive her: “from time to time, enough was administered to soothe her considerably.” Isabella was so weak after her thirty-seven hour labour that forceps were used to deliver “a healthy & strong boy.” In a brisk allusion to her sister’s opium addiction, Maria Macpherson commented that it was no wonder the baby was very thin, “seeing he had been living on pills so long.” Named “John Alexander” after his father, the child also inherited his famous nose. Maria whisked him back to Kingston to be cared for with her own brood. In an age of high mortality, the survival of both mother and child was a triumph — a point bizarrely driven home when Isabella’s obstetrician suddenly died four weeks later. Despite Macdonald’s intentions to stay in New York, he was soon forced to leave his “agitated” wife and return to his “solitary & miserable” life in Montreal. Worse still, her new doctor believed that Isabella’s problems were psychological and sought to boost her confidence by persuading her to walk the length of her bedroom. She collapsed totally, and did not muster the strength to return to Kingston for a further nine months. Meanwhile, Macdonald’s mother suffered a series of strokes, stretching the family womanpower to the limits. Forced to hire nurses for Isabella, Macdonald wrote that “we are in a nice mess.”

But Canada’s problems took priority, and the province needed its receiver-general at his desk. In the fall of 1847, an international banking crisis threatened government finances. Macdonald notified London banks of Cabinet’s decision to raise the interest rates on Canadian bonds, thus giving himself useful name-recognition in the world’s leading financial centre. The elections followed, and Macdonald no longer talked of only serving a single term.

Not only did he mobilize Kingston’s Orangemen against a challenge from Tory Thomas Kirkpatrick, himself an Irish Protestant, but he also attempted to woo the city’s Catholic bishop. Macdonald was handily re-elected, but the Reformers triumphed across the province. Macdonald’s colleagues remained in office as caretakers until the new Assembly met in March 1848 and deposed them. Oddly enough, this graveyard shift witnessed an intense period of activity, the foundation of Macdonald’s reputation for efficient administration. During the election campaign, he had switched portfolios to become commissioner of Crown Lands, and now he launched a whirlwind attack on its somnolent bureaucracy. The Trust and Loan Company needed reliable title deeds to issue mortgages, and delays in paperwork at Crown Lands were bad for business.

Macdonald’s brief ministerial career was the prelude to six years of powerless opposition: as he confessed to an importunate constituent in 1849, “I have no influence whatever.” Yet, despite domestic, professional, and political problems, he remained in Parliament. In June 1848, Isabella returned to Kingston, bearing the journey from New York “wonderfully well.” To create personal space for his wife, Macdonald rented a house on the edge of Kingston, where the cooling breeze off Lake Ontario perhaps triggered a resurgence of her facial tic. Isabella ran the household from her bedroom. Having lived on a Georgia slave plantation, she was tough on servants: Macdonald nicknamed her the “Invisible Lady.”

A happy and alert child, “John the younger” was cared for by a nurse but spent hours energetically playing with toys on his mother’s bed. Isabella confessed to her sister: “my very soul is bound up in him.... did I not purchase him dearly?” The little boy was “in good health” when his first birthday was celebrated in August 1848. Seven weeks later, he was dead. One account mentions a fall, another convulsions: perhaps he tumbled from Isabella’s bed and sustained head injuries? Of course, his parents never fully overcame their grief. Moving house in Ottawa in 1883, Macdonald’s second wife discovered a mysterious box of toys: her husband quietly identified them as “little John A.’s.” Isabella became trapped in a cycle of grief, pain, opium, and prostration. She was greatly distressed when her husband travelled to Montreal for the February 1849 parliamentary session — but Macdonald insisted that his attendance was “a matter of necessity.”

Although he maintained his low profile, the 1849 session became a landmark in Macdonald’s career. The new Reform ministry proposed to pay compensation for damage caused by government forces in Lower Canada during the 1837–38 rebellions. Convicted rebels were excluded — but very few insurgents had actually been prosecuted in those troubled times. Sympathy for the rebels had been widespread among French Canadians, and paying off claims for damage was a form of peace process, drawing a line under a tragic episode. But Tories violently objected to compensating the disloyal and embarked on a high risk strategy of reckless protest, designed to force the British government to intervene and restore them as Canada’s natural rulers. Macdonald denounced the compensation proposals as “most shameful,” and almost fought a duel with a Reform minister. But, as in 1837, he disapproved of extremism and fell silent as the temperature rose dangerously. Even amidst the cauldron of party hatred, he needed to pass technical legislation for the Commercial Bank.

In April 1849, he secured leave of absence from the Assembly for “urgent private business,” probably another crisis in Isabella’s health. He was lucky to get away from Montreal. On April 25, the city’s anglophone mob burned down the parliament buildings. Macdonald condemned their behaviour, although he also blamed ministers for provoking popular anger. Arrogant and violent, the Tories had gone too far. Some even showed the hypocrisy of their vaunted allegiance to Queen Victoria by threatening to join the United States. The Conservative Party needed urgent reconstruction.

As a punishment, Montreal ceased to be Canada’s capital. Parliament would meet first in Toronto and then go to Quebec City for five years. Macdonald insisted that “the system of alternate Parliaments would never do”: Canada needed a permanent capital and Kingston was an attractive compromise. A new organization offered a way of rebuilding the party and boosting the city. In July 1849, 150 delegates gathered there for Canada’s first political convention, to launch the British American League, which aimed to broaden Conservative support with new policies. Macdonald was a backstage organizer: as the Globe remarked, “he never says much anywhere except in barrooms.” His aim was to create a new party organization, while demonstrating that Kingston’s City Hall could host Canada’s Parliament. As Macdonald hoped, the convention “put its foot on the idea of annexation.” However, he displayed no enthusiasm for the League’s alternative policy, the union of British North America, an early proposal for Confederation.

At forty, Isabella was expecting a second child. A painful and sleepless pregnancy was exacerbated by grief at the death of her sister Jane in November 1849, but the following March she gave birth to a son, Hugh John. “I never expected another,” Macdonald admitted. To add to the pressures upon him, in September 1849, Macdonald lost his law partner. Alexander Campbell admired his mentor but he could not cope with Macdonald’s casual business practices. Although working relations with Campbell subsequently improved, the breach of 1849 never completely healed. Four months later, Macdonald likened himself to “a thief on a treadmill” as he tried to maintain his practice single handed until he could find a new partner. To save money and escape unhappy memories, the Macdonalds moved back into town. Isabella’s health was worrying and expensive: for a time, she was so weak that she was “unable to raise her hand to her head.” A medical bill for fourteen months in 1850–51 shows that her doctor visited 132 times — a home call every three days — at a dollar a consultation.

Over the next five years, before his return to office in 1854, Macdonald’s priority was to strengthen his finances. He achieved some short-term success, but at the price of long-range problems. In 1850, he persuaded the Assembly to exempt the Trust and Loan Company from the Usury Laws so that it could charge higher interest rates. Macdonald promptly crossed the Atlantic to recruit British investors. Calling him “a respectable man and tolerably moderate in his views,” Lord Elgin helped Macdonald make contacts in London. Effectively, the Canadian operation was converted into a financial branch-plant under British control, giving Macdonald valuable experience in dealing with the elite who ran the Empire. The company’s Canadian headquarters remained in Kingston, where Macdonald was returned by acclamation in the 1851 election. For the rest of his life, Trust and Loan Company business helped subsidize his political career.

Unfortunately, John A. Macdonald was less successful as a speculator. His preferred strategy was to make a down-payment on a block of land and quickly sell it at a profit, settling the balance of the purchase price from the proceeds and pocketing the gain. In a spectacular deal in 1852–53, he invested a $1,000 deposit to secure land worth $5,060, which was soon sold for $9,400 — $4,360 profit for a thousand dollar outlay! Naively, Macdonald assumed that Canada’s property bubble would continue, predicting in 1853 that “without exertion, I will be next year a rich man.” In fact, two years later, he admitted that he was so over-extended that he could barely meet the instalments on his purchases, and begged creditors not to press him for money. He was naively over-optimistic in his hopes for a quick buck, buying land in Peterborough, Lindsay, and Owen Sound, prosperous communities but hardly boom towns. He owned 175 building lots at Guelph, a town of two thousand people, but by 1868 had sold fewer than a quarter of them. Even in dynamic Toronto, he was still paying city taxes on vacant sites decades later. He survived financially thanks to a growing overdraft from Kingston’s Commercial Bank, although his duty as a director should have included asking hard questions about its indulgent business practices.

For an ex-minister, Macdonald seemed inconspicuous in Parliament: not until 1852 did he act like an opposition front-bencher, relentlessly criticizing the government. However, he championed one explosive issue. In 1848, the Reform ministry established a commission to investigate the Toronto Globe’s charges of cruelty in Kingston Penitentiary. There was certainly a case to answer, but it was a mistake to appoint the Globe’s masterful proprietor George Brown as the enquiry’s secretary. Warden Smith, the target of Brown’s denunciations, turned to his friend John A. Macdonald, who campaigned for another enquiry — into Brown’s conduct. This was dangerous ground. Brown was a very sensitive bully, who smarted under criticism. Reform ministers rejected John A. Macdonald’s annual demand: in 1851, he mocked their “cowardly fear of George Brown.”

Among Upper Canada Reformers, the underlying split between radicals and moderates was revived by the “Clear Grits,” whose rock-hard principles demanded American-style elective institutions. When the 1851 census showed that Upper Canada now had slightly more people than Lower Canada, they also demanded representation by population, “rep. by pop.” for short. The issue flared in 1853, when the Assembly was enlarged from eighty-four seats to 130 — but still equally apportioned, sixty-five from each section. Upper Canada was booming not only demographically but economically: why, demanded the Grits, should the section paying the most taxes tolerate a veto from backward French Canada? Their outcry made life difficult for their francophone counterparts, the Rouges, as most Lower Canadians rallied to the moderate Bleus. With responsible government secured, the Bleus felt increasingly uneasy at being in political partnership with the Grit-dominated Reformers.

Throughout his opposition years, John A. Macdonald struggled to re-brand his party, even calling himself a “progressive Conservative,” a name the Tories only adopted in 1942. Occasionally he despaired, once telling Campbell that the party was “nowhere, damned everlastingly.” However, as the 1854 election approached, moderate Upper Canadian Reformers, followers of Premier Francis Hincks, sought to break with the uncomfortable Grits and find new allies. Hincks had personally profited from insider political knowledge — “rampant corruption,” Macdonald had called it. But even if he did not survive in office, Hincks would act as king-maker — and he disliked Brown’s dictatorial style.

The issue of the clergy reserves potentially blocked a Conservative-Hincksite coalition. In 1791, the British government had reserved one-seventh of the unsettled land in Canada — mainly in the upper province — to support the Anglican Church. In 1840, the reserves had been shared among several sects, but Grits wanted to end all State involvement in the financing of religion and transfer the entire land bank to the community. John A. Macdonald mocked the thought of “those worthy people in the Kingston Penitentiary” paying for their own prison chaplains. However, it was not an issue that he cared about deeply, and he recalled that anger against the clergy reserves had helped provoke rebellion in 1837. In June 1854, the Conservative caucus decided that if Upper Canada voted for secularization they would not resist. Reality was accepted even by Sir Allan MacNab, whose Tory rantings had been blamed for the Montreal riots.

John A. Macdonald had travelled a long way since 1849, when he had supported the slogan “no French domination.” He accepted the necessity to “make friends with the French” and “respect their nationality.” “Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do — generously. Call them a faction, and they will become factious.” Moving the capital to Quebec City in 1852 had helped him get to know French Canadians: even if he barely spoke their language, he enjoyed their conviviality. Early in 1854, he predicted that a new government would be formed after the elections, “and from my friendly relations with the French, I am inclined to believe my assistance will be sought.” It had taken him ten years to unlearn the toxic lessons of 1844. John A. Macdonald’s second decade in public life would explore the limitations of partnership politics in a divided province.