Читать книгу The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle - Ged Martin - Страница 8

1864–1867

Confederation, Under a Female Sovereign

The insecure government formed by Etienne Taché in March 1864 faced collapse within eleven weeks. Nonetheless, John A. Macdonald’s decision to take office under Taché proved a turning point in his career. In mid-June, the Cabinet was reconstructed to become the “Great Coalition” which launched Confederation. The revised ministry was essentially a deal between Cartier’s Bleus and George Brown’s Grits: if Macdonald had not already joined in March, there would have been no room to bring him aboard in June.

Aside from its collective desire to oust Sandfield Macdonald, the March 1864 minority government had no “big idea.” Sandfield had quarrelled with the Irish Catholics, so their representative, Reformer Michael Foley, was invited into the new Cabinet. When Foley cautiously enquired about the ministry’s guiding principles, John A. Macdonald jovially urged him to “join the Government and then help make the policy.” In Parliament, Macdonald implied that the new Cabinet endorsed the Confederation bid of 1858. “The Government had done all in its power to have this federation remedy adopted” — but, unfortunately, the Maritimers were not interested. As a policy statement, it was watertight. As a blueprint for action, it was unhelpful.

Taking an independent line in politics, Brown secured a parliamentary committee on constitutional change. His task force reported in June “in favour of changes in the direction of a federative system” — but whether for the province of Canada or the whole of British North America remained an open question. John A. Macdonald opposed the report: he favoured “a complete union,” but he knew compromise was required. His 1861 election manifesto had briefly talked of federation, but with “an efficient central government” — the British model adapted to learn from American failures. The mid-June ministerial crisis concluded with George Brown joining the Cabinet to resolve Canada’s sectional disagreements. Although it united to carry Confederation, the Great Coalition was also a continuation of factional fighting in a new guise: Brown and Macdonald grasped each other not by the hand but by the throat. In the tense negotiations of June 1864, Macdonald out-manoeuvred his enemy on four issues, but — on the most crucial — his victory contained a time bomb.

As in 1862, Brown initially promised independent support for constitutional reform, claiming it was “quite impossible” for him to sit in Cabinet alongside political enemies. It was easy to foresee that some issue would soon outrage Brown’s implacable conscience, and Macdonald was not alone in insisting that it was “essential” that he joined. Macdonald then faced down Brown’s reasonable demand that the Grits, dominant in Upper Canada, should have four of that section’s six Cabinet places: his rival conceded only three. Macdonald’s comment that “he had been for some time, anxious to retire from the Government, and would be quite ready to facilitate arrangements by doing so,” was a threatening reminder that he was indispensable. A third issue was Brown’s demand that Macdonald publicly retract the allegations he had made between 1849 and 1856 over the penitentiary enquiry. It seems that Macdonald soothingly sidestepped the commitment. Brown never received his “public reparation,” and his resentment festered at being cheated of revenge.

The fourth — and major — issue concerned the coalition’s policy. Brown wanted to reorganize the province of Canada as a local (Ontario-Quebec) federation, with provision for the Maritimes and the West to join later. Initially, of course, the central legislature would be dominated by Upper Canada’s population and hence run by Upper Canada’s Grits — a structure that might be unattractive to potential new members. Macdonald’s counter-proposal, “a Federal Union of all the British North American Provinces,” was dismissed by Brown as “uncertain and remote,” no solution to the “existing evils.” However, one development worked in favour of the wider scheme. The governments of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island were considering an Atlantic regional union. If the Canadians could secure an invitation to the planned Maritime Union conference in September, and if they could argue persuasively for Confederation, then the larger union might become a practical option. “If it had not been for this fortunate coincidence of events,” Macdonald said in 1865, “never, perhaps ... would we have been able to bring this scheme to a practical conclusion.” The Great Coalition struck a deal. Ministers would “address themselves, in the most earnest manner, to the negotiation for a confederation of all the British North American Provinces.” But, if the initiative failed, they would legislate “in the next session of Parliament” to create a local federation for Canada alone.

Given parliamentary timetables, Macdonald had gained maybe nine months to launch the dormant project of Confederation before conceding victory to Brown. His best hope was to play for time and extend the deadline. But everything depended upon winning over a group of small-pond Maritime politicians, most of them strangers to him. If they said “No” at Charlottetown, John A. Macdonald’s career would hit the buffers. Working hard to prepare an outline scheme, and with his business affairs in disarray, he was under great pressure that summer, even appearing at one Cabinet meeting aggressively drunk.

Fortunately, despite much champagne diplomacy, he remained sober and performed impressively at Charlottetown. Although the meetings were held in secret, we know that the Canadians — Brown, Galt, and Cartier included — swept their hosts into endorsing Confederation in principle. The delegates then sailed on to Halifax where, on September 12, John A. Macdonald delivered a heartfelt speech. He had spent “twenty long years” dragging himself through “the dreary waste” of provincial politics. “I thought there was no end, nothing worthy of ambition” but Confederation was “well worthy of all I have suffered in the cause of my little country.” He accepted that that “local difficulties may arise ... local jealousies may intervene” but asserted that the union of the provinces was “a fixed fact.” “Union must take place some time. I say now is the time.” On the return journey, the delegates visited New Brunswick to speak at Saint John. It was a worrying sign that Macdonald was too exhausted to leave the ship.

On October 10, 1864, provincial delegations began a three-week conference at Quebec to convert the outline agreement of Charlottetown into a constitutional blueprint. “Unless the details can be made satisfactory the whole thing must break down,” Macdonald warned. He called for “a powerful central government,” with the provinces assigned “only such powers as may be required for local purposes.” He reminded the Maritimers of the coalition’s timetable, warning that if Canada was compelled to tackle its own problems, “it will be too late for a general federation.” He also told them that the “Intercolonial” railway from Halifax to Quebec was conditional on Confederation, “a political consequence of a political union.”

D’Arcy McGee later claimed that John A. Macdonald crafted fifty of the seventy-two resolutions that comprised the Quebec scheme. “Not one man of the Conference (except Galt on finance) had the slightest idea of Constitution making,” Macdonald privately boasted. “Whatever is good or ill in the constitution is mine.” Would there have been a Confederation movement without John A. Macdonald? Probably. Would it have been led with the same skill and efficiency? Perhaps not.

Macdonald was open about his belief that “one government and one parliament ... would be the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous and the strongest system of government we could adopt.” Realistically, he also recognized that centralization was unacceptable to French Canadians, because they were “a minority, with a different language, nationality, and religion.” But a “smoking gun” in a letter to Tory politician, Matthew Crooks Cameron, might suggest he was playing a secret double game. Cameron admitted that the “federal principle does not inspire me with a feeling of confidence,” but John A. Macdonald reassured him that “we have hit upon the only practicable plan — I do not say the best plan … for carrying out the Confederation.” He went further, predicting that British North America would evolve into a unitary state: “you, if spared the ordinary age of men, will see both Local Parliaments & Governments absorbed in the General power. This is as plain to me as if I saw it accomplished but of course it does not do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.” Was there was a deep-laid plot to smuggle some toxic provision into the constitution, a poison time-capsule that the forty-two-year-old Cameron would live to see destroy the provinces? Hardly. Macdonald was trying to hoodwink Cameron with “spin,” and even that failed. When Cameron argued for a legislative union in Parliament, Macdonald replied that French Canadians and Maritimers opposed a unitary scheme. “How, then, is it to be accomplished?” Macdonald knew that Cameron was a gentleman, and gentlemen did not divulge private correspondence.

Indeed, Macdonald rejected the best instrument for destroying the provinces. The Fathers of Confederation used New Zealand’s federal constitution as a quarry: it was even the source of the celebrated phrase “peace, order and good government.” That document gave the colony’s General Assembly power to abolish New Zealand’s constituent provinces, which it exercised in 1876. But when the Nova Scotian centralizer Jonathan McCully argued for copying this provision, Macdonald retorted: “That is just what we do not want.” John A. Macdonald did not plot to undermine Canada’s provinces.

The workload of the Quebec Conference took its toll. “John A. Macdonald is always drunk now,” commented one observer: he was found in his hotel room, a rug draped over his nightshirt, in front of a mirror declaiming Hamlet. The genial “John A.” was in overdrive, designing Canada’s new constitution at the expense of his own. After the conference, the delegates headed for a banquet in the nearly-complete Ottawa Parliament Buildings. Keynote speaker would be John A. Macdonald, “but illness ... compelled him to curtail his observations.” Two weeks later he was “still weak.” “I got a severe shock at Ottawa and was very near going off the books,” he admitted. Although his collapse was reportedly “induced by fatigue from assiduous attention to public affairs,” alcohol was a rumoured contributory cause. However, six years later, Macdonald was diagnosed as suffering from gallstones. His 1864 illness perhaps resulted from the banqueting that accompanied the Quebec Conference, too much rich food for his tender gallbladder.

While he was designing a new constitution, Macdonald was also running the existing government machine — and a time of continental crisis as the American Civil War moved to a close. Southern sympathizers marooned in Canada were arrested after raiding a bank in the border town of St. Albans, Vermont. In mid-December, 1864, C.J. Coursol, a lowly Montreal magistrate, freed them on a technicality, and the raiders even recovered their loot. Macdonald hoped to escape Quebec to spend Christmas in Kingston, “but if there are other such fools as Coursol in the world, I’ll never get away.” He established Canada’s first secret service, to collect intelligence on Southern sympathizers, and also to watch a new menace, the Fenians, an American-based paramilitary organization that aimed to free Ireland by attacking Canada.

In February 1865, the Canadian Parliament debated Confederation, with Macdonald leading off for the government. Unusually, he had rehearsed his speech. Indeed, his Quebec City landlord feared for Macdonald’s sanity when his distinguished tenant locked himself in his room and harangued the lodging-house cat. Even so, it was a low-key performance. Speaking for several hours, Macdonald outlined the unexciting details of the proposed structure, insisting that the Quebec scheme was a “treaty” agreed with the Maritimers, a package that Canada’s legislators must not amend. Calling Confederation “an opportunity that may never recur,” he concluded by hailing “the happy opportunity now offered of founding a great nation.” Calling it “the feeblest speech he had ever delivered,” Reformer Luther Holton claimed that the centralist Macdonald did not truly believe in the federal system he had helped devise. The charge rankled, and weeks into the marathon debate Macdonald delivered a sparkling extempore rebuttal: maybe his earlier speech had sounded feeble, “but as to my sentiments on Confederation, they were the sentiments of my life, my sentiments in Parliament years ago, my sentiments in the Conference, and my sentiments now.”

Macdonald’s speech was downbeat partly because it was the curtain-raiser to a comprehensive ministerial battery: Galt talked about finance, Brown and Cartier the advantages of Confederation to Upper and Lower Canada, while D’Arcy McGee supplied the oratorical fireworks. Another factor was disturbing news from the Maritimes, where public opinion was startled by the novelty of the project. Indeed, in New Brunswick, Premier Tilley had already been forced to call an election, rather than face a mutinous local Assembly. Overheated speeches in the Canadian Assembly might sound suspiciously triumphal on the Atlantic seaboard. Indeed, Macdonald unwittingly created problems for his Maritime allies by stating that the promised Intercolonial Railway would not form “a portion of the Constitution.” Tilley’s opponents jumped on the statement, claiming that the Canadians could not be trusted.

The news, early in March, that New Brunswickers had in fact voted against Confederation showed John A. Macdonald at his fighting best. He frankly accepted that Tilley’s election defeat was “a declaration against the policy of Federation,” but he roundly refused to abandon the cause. Rather, the setback was “an additional reason for prompt and vigorous action.” The New Brunswick reverse, “the first check that the project has received,” only highlighted the astonishing progress the issue had made since the formation of the coalition in June 1864.

“Things are not going on so badly with the Maritime Provinces,” he wrote optimistically. “In New Brunswick the question will ere long be carried. Nova Scotia is all right but hangs fire until New Brunswick is put straight.” In fact, this analysis reflected something more than Macdonald’s habitual tendency to put a positive spin on bad news. The New Brunswick result was closer than the landslide in seats suggested: several pro-Confederation candidates had only narrowly lost. In any case, the contest had been “the usual fight between the ins and the outs,” with “a lot of other influences at work” besides the Confederation issue. Although the new ministry was united in opposing the Quebec scheme, their reasons were contradictory: some opposed any union with Canada, others criticized the terms. Macdonald was right about Nova Scotia too. Premier Charles Tupper, with whom he had struck a rapport at Charlottetown, was masterfully controlling the local political agenda, keeping Confederation on the backburner to avoid its outright rejection. If Canada kept up the momentum, the New Brunswick ministry might well break up. The big prize for the Maritimers in Confederation was the Intercolonial Railway. Once New Brunswick changed sides, Nova Scotia would fall into line to ensure that Halifax and not Saint John became its Atlantic terminus. In April 1865, Tupper reckoned the situation could be turned around in twelve months.

Unfortunately, Macdonald did not have twelve months. The June 1864 coalition deal committed ministers to George Brown’s plan for a federation of the two Canadas if the wider union was not achieved by mid-1865. Dispatched to England in November 1864 to report on the Quebec Conference, George Brown had been hailed by Britain’s statesmen as the messenger of Confederation. Privately, however, he was relaxed about the setback in New Brunswick, and ready to insist on his Plan B. Macdonald announced that a delegation would be sent to London, to mobilize imperial support for Confederation. Brown had to be persuaded to make a second transatlantic trip within six months — getting him on board ship was crucial to keeping him on board politically. Accordingly, the delegation’s agenda was extended to include cross-border trade and the future of the Hudson’s Bay territories, both issues of concern to Brown. Cartier and Galt represented Lower Canada and Macdonald, despite a reluctance to travel, would speak for Upper Canada. Brown could not trust his rivals to represent Canada’s interests; they could not risk leaving him behind, where he might find some pretext to break up the coalition. So, in April 1865, Brown crossed the ocean once again, travelling with John A. Macdonald. Indeed, in the confined shipboard space, the two men had to pretend they were friends as well as allies.

The Canadian mission to Britain made a mighty splash, and the delegates received a welcome unprecedented for mere colonials. Famous statesmen engaged them in top-level conferences. They were presented to Queen Victoria, entertained by the Prince of Wales and given a memorable excursion to England’s famous horse race, the Derby. However, British politicians limited their support to polite goodwill. They were wary about spending money on defending Canada against the Americans, and seemed to view Confederation as a step towards transatlantic disengagement. The delegation’s major achievement, as Macdonald put it, was that they “happily succeeded in keeping the question alive” in Britain. The British government issued a strong declaration of support for Confederation, enough to ward off immediate pressure to restructure the province of Canada alone. For Macdonald, there was also a personal prize: Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate. Oxford ceremonies could be raucous, but “Mr. Macdonald, the Canadian, had a good reception.” To be announced back at Government House as “Dr. Macdonald” offered some consolation for the inadequacy of his own education: Gowan thought that the Oxford degree “would gratify you more than a knighthood.” Macdonald modestly accepted the honour on behalf of Canada, but it was noteworthy that he was singled out as the recipient.

Soon after Macdonald’s return to Canada, there was a sharp, sad reminder of the tight agenda facing the coalition. Premier Taché had sacrificed his health in launching the new Canada, and died on July 30, 1865. An incandescent George Brown blocked Lord Monck’s attempt to appoint John A. Macdonald as Taché’s successor. Brown’s price for accepting the Quebec City lawyer Sir Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau (a member of Macdonald’s 1857–58 Cabinet) as compromise premier was the re-statement of the coalition’s dual objective, reaffirming the commitment to create a purely Canadian federation if the wider project stalled. The deadline was shifted back to 1866.

With Belleau a figurehead, Macdonald effectively led the government. Paradoxically, political leadership involved keeping the lid on Canadian politics to avoid rows that might inflame Maritime suspicions. Upper and Lower Canada would enter Confederation as separate provinces (named Ontario and Quebec in 1867) but Canadians were left to perform their own bisection. Discussion of the new provincial constitutions would certainly reignite controversy over Catholic schools. Since the Irish Catholic vote was important in New Brunswick, Macdonald simply delayed the 1866 session of Canada’s legislature. New Brunswick politicians insisted that they favoured uniting the provinces but disliked the Quebec Conference terms — but Canada’s Parliament had signed up to the Quebec package. As Macdonald explained, once Canada’s legislature met, ministers would be “pressed to declare whether we adhered to the Quebec resolutions or not.” To answer “yes” would condemn his New Brunswick allies to defeat, but “no” would outrage French Canada: either way would be “good-bye to Federation.” In his later career, Macdonald would be nicknamed “Old Tomorrow.” In the winter of 1865–66, he first showed his skills at procrastination.

Throughout the winter of 1865–66, reports from New Brunswick confidently predicted the slow-motion disintegration of opposition to Confederation. Tilley became premier again in April 1866, and in a June election he won a pro-Union election majority — helped by campaign funds quietly raised among Macdonald’s Canadian supporters. Meanwhile, in December 1865, George Brown resigned from the coalition, ostensibly over the handling of trade talks in Washington: characteristically, if unrealistically, Brown had argued that the provinces should stand up to the Americans and force them to renew the cross-border Reciprocity Treaty. Cartier and Campbell tried to persuade Brown not to quit, but for Macdonald, the parting was a relief, the more so as the other Reformers in the coalition preferred working with John A. to taking orders from George Brown. However, Brown’s resignation meant that the Globe could resume its vendetta against Macdonald. It was not long before John A. Macdonald supplied the pretext.

Symbolic of the approaching new era, Canada’s capital finally moved to Ottawa. Macdonald founded the elite Rideau Club to provide social amenities, but the city’s general lack of facilities — ominously, Ottawa lacked even a piped water supply — had what Lord Monck discreetly called “a damaging effect on public men.” Despite the fiasco of 1862, Macdonald was once again minister of militia, and bearing a heavy responsibility. With the end of the Civil War, Irish-American soldiers joined the Fenians who planned to attack Canada. Mobilizing Canada’s defence forces every time there was an invasion alarm would paralyze the provincial economy, but failure to respond to a credible warning would risk Canadian lives. Macdonald struck the right balance: 14,000 part-time soldiers were called out on May 31, the day nine hundred Fenians crossed the Niagara River. Two days later, the paramilitaries killed nine militiamen at the Battle of Ridgeway. The invaders withdrew and the American authorities belatedly tightened up border security, but the threat remained. Macdonald dismissed calls for the summary arrest of suspected Fenian sympathizers: “illiterate magistrates” would simply persecute their peaceable Catholic neighbours. It was difficult to persuade the public that the government was on top of the danger. “Because they do not see what we are doing in the Newspapers, they think we are doing nothing.”

The delay caused by New Brunswick was not the only constraint on the Confederation timetable. By the time Canada’s legislature finally met in June 1866, the governor general was “uneasy.” Britain’s Parliament generally took a holiday between August and February, but in 1866 an autumn session seemed likely to tackle a political crisis over parliamentary reform. Lord Monck wanted to complete Canada’s preparations, travel to London, and pass the Confederation act before the close of 1866. On June 21, he threatened to resign if Confederation faltered. Macdonald read the governor general a polite lecture on constitutional responsibility, urging Monck to trust “my Canadian Parliamentary experience.” As for Confederation, “success is certain, and it is now not even a question of strategy. It is merely one of tactics.” But uncertainty returned when Britain’s Liberal government resigned and an inexperienced minority Conservative ministry took office. There would be no autumn session, and if the parliamentary reform issue could not be resolved when Westminster reassembled early in 1867, a British general election would follow. Nova Scotians were due to vote too, around June 1867. Although the colony’s politicians had fallen into line with New Brunswick, proud Bluenoses might well reject Confederation.

Drafting legislation would require “weeks of anxious and constant labour” in England, but preparations seemed lethargic in Ottawa. Proposed local constitutions for Upper and Lower Canada were introduced on July 13, 1866, but there was no sense of urgency about ratifying them. On August 6, the Globe denounced the delay as “shameful,” ominously blaming “Ministerial incapacity.” It was “the common talk of Ottawa” that Macdonald was responding to pressure in his usual deplorably liquid way: Monck’s resignation threat had likely been a coded warning. In mid-August, the Globe abandoned all restraint to report that Macdonald had made a “wild and incoherent” speech in Parliament, proof that he was “in a state of gross intoxication.” George Brown’s newspaper broadened its attack over a three-week period. Never before, it claimed, had a Cabinet minister been “seen to hold on to his desk to prevent himself from falling … with utterance so thick as to be almost incomprehensible … so utterly gone at mid-day as to be unconscious of what he was doing.” Macdonald’s drunken bouts threatened the “postponement of Confederation.”

Macdonald’s alcohol problem was no secret, but public attitudes to drink were ambivalent. One supporter even urged him “not to rely on Cold Water, & tea, & coffee alone, to sustain your not very robust &, sometimes over-wrought frame.” Macdonald had twice publicly admitted his need to reform, but the temperance groups he joined were widely viewed as cranks and killjoys. Macdonald often joked about his weakness, claiming that Canadians preferred John A. drunk to George Brown sober. Legend claimed that Macdonald once shocked an audience by vomiting during a public debate, but charmed them by explaining that his opponent’s policies turned his stomach. Pressures of the Confederation timetable plus his lonely Ottawa existence probably explain why Macdonald was drinking heavily. Friendship with fellow minister D’Arcy McGee, another notorious boozer, worsened the problem. The Globe declared that “never before were two Ministers of the Crown seen at one time rolling helplessly on the Ministerial bench.” Legend claimed that Macdonald told his colleague that the Cabinet could not afford two drunks — so McGee must give up alcohol. Macdonald threatened to sue, but the case never came to court, and even his apologists did not deny the stories. Instead, his defenders organized a banquet in his honour, held at Kingston on September 5, where the impressively sober guest of honour obliquely deplored the “wanton and unprovoked attack” upon him. Guest speakers lavished generous praise as damage limitation, but one speech was so exaggerated it almost destroyed Macdonald’s career.

Leading an anti-Confederation delegation in London, the veteran Nova Scotian politician Joseph Howe pounced upon McGee’s overblown statement that Macdonald had crafted fifty of the seventy-two Quebec resolutions. On October 3, Howe released a statement “charitably” attributing the “incoherent” nature of the Confederation project to alcoholic excess, and asking why Maritimers should be ruled by Canadian politicians who “cannot govern themselves.” Alarm bells rang at the highest levels of the Empire. The Globe had specifically charged that Macdonald had been drunk during the Fenian raid, and Lord Monck had privately confirmed that the minister of militia had been “incapable of all official business for days on end.” London bureaucrats were aghast at Macdonald’s behaviour. One argued that they should “endeavour to get the Offender ousted.” Senior civil servant Frederic Rogers hoped “the Canadians will have the good sense to keep Mr. John A. Macdonald on the other side of the Atlantic.” There were urgent consultations among British Cabinet ministers. The colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon, concluded that “in spite of his notorious vice,” Macdonald was “the ablest politician in Upper Canada.” Losing Macdonald “would absolutely destroy Confederation”; without Confederation, Canada would eventually join the United States. In a carefully worded letter to Monck, sent on October 19, Carnarvon avoided naming the offender but stressed that “undoubted ability” was no excuse for drunkenness. By the time he sailed for England in mid-November, Macdonald would have known how close his career had come to disaster. Had he been excluded from the final Confederation talks in London in 1866–67, he would hardly have become the Dominion’s first prime minister.

Preparation of the new British American constitution fell into two parts, a debate on the blueprint among the colonial delegates themselves before Christmas, and negotiations with the British in the New Year to shape an act of Parliament. Thirteen delegates representing Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia began talks at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel on December 4, 1866, concluding their deliberations on Christmas Eve. The politician who had so nearly been banned from taking part became, in the tribute of fellow delegate Hector Langevin, the key figure, “l’homme de la conférence.” Indeed, his primacy was recognized at the outset, when the Maritimers proposed him as chairman. Maritime delegates also quietly accepted the Quebec scheme as the basis for discussion — there was no alternative blueprint. Delegates began with an outline survey of the seventy-two resolutions, deleting those that applied only to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, which had dropped out of the movement, and highlighting others for reconsideration. Then they started over again, working through the scheme in detail. In all, they sat for around sixty hours, allowing about fifty minutes to examine each resolution. The Maritimers were “excessively fond of talking” but few changes were made. Much of the credit went to the chairman, “un fin renard,” Langevin called him, the elegant fox — well-informed, persuasive, capable, and popular. Macdonald’s contribution was remarkable since, for much of the conference, he was in pain, having badly burned himself in a hotel-room fire.

After Christmas there was a lull, while the Colonial Office considered the delegates’ work. Even Macdonald managed to take a short break in Paris. Then, as the February 1867 meeting of the Westminster Parliament approached, the pace quickened and the pressure intensified, with some disagreements between the delegates and British policy-makers. There were problems in turning the fuzzy edges of the “London Resolutions” into the sharp language of an act of Parliament, while British concerns, for instance about the role of the Senate, opened regional divisions and strained the harmony of December.

By January 13, 1867, Macdonald feared “a good deal of difficulty” with his francophone colleagues, Cartier and Langevin, over “the proposed change as to Property and Civil rights.” It seems that the British were probing an overlap in the delegates’ London Resolutions, which allocated responsibility for “Marriage and Divorce” to the central Parliament, but gave the provinces control over “Property and civil rights (including the solemnization of marriages).” As devout Catholics, French Canadians rejected divorce but they recognized that British North America’s Protestant majority permitted the dissolution of failed marriages. Hence, in a very Canadian compromise, the central Parliament could grant divorces, but Lower Canada’s legislature would have power to prevent Catholic divorcees from remarrying within the province.

If there was a row over marriage laws, it was soon settled, but it triggered a nasty conspiracy theory. When Cartier died in 1873, a Quebec journalist, Elzéar Gérin, claimed that the anglophone delegates in London tried to bully their two French colleagues into accepting a centralized union. But, said Gérin, Cartier outwitted them, by mobilizing the figurehead premier, Narcisse Belleau, who had been left behind in Canada. Belleau was warned to stand by for a telegram telling him to submit the Great Coalition’s resignation, a nuclear option that would halt Confederation. Gérin had been sent to London to cover the talks, after serving a prison sentence in Ottawa for punching a politician. Since the delegates had agreed on complete secrecy, he relied on oblique briefings from Langevin. Gérin was not a reliable witness, and he likely exaggerated rumours of a brief row over marriage policy. The story surfaced again in 1886, after the hanging of Louis Riel. This time there was just one villain, who had allegedly conducted an insidious campaign to re-write the scheme. The slander still echoes: John A. Macdonald, the devious enemy of French Canada, allegedly plotted to twist Canada’s constitution into a centralizing document that would destroy Quebec. The evidence proves this to be nonsense. Five drafts of the proposed constitution written between Christmas 1866 and February 9, 1867 survive. All are based on the London Resolutions, and there is no trace of the extensive restructuring required to impose centralized control.

These documents formed the basis for tense negotiations between the delegates and the British. Whitehall deputy minister Frederic Rogers, who had wanted Macdonald to dry out in Canada, now hailed him as “the ruling genius and spokesman” among the visitors. “I was very greatly struck by his power of management and adroitness.” The French Canadians and the Maritimers were on guard against any damaging concession, “as eager dogs watch a rat hole,” Rogers thought. Macdonald argued controversial points “with cool, ready fluency,” determined to avoid “the slightest divergence from the narrow line already agreed” by his colleagues; “every word was measured … while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a moment unconscious of any of the rocks among which he had to steer.” The British had found their strong man to lead the new Canada, but they did not tear up the agreed Confederation blueprint, nor did he ask them to do so.

Indeed, the British vetoed one of Macdonald’s most fervent wishes, that the Confederation should be styled the “Kingdom of Canada.” Fearful of upsetting the Americans, they preferred the term “Dominion.” “A great opportunity was lost,” Macdonald complained two decades later, but perhaps he won one minor victory in the naming stakes. British officials had assumed that Lower Canada would resume its historic name, Quebec, inferring from this that Upper Canada would become the province of Toronto. Macdonald’s Kingston voters resented the upstart rival city, and he probably chose the unexpected name of “Ontario” for the revived province.

The finalized bill was introduced into Westminster on February 19 and passed into law, as the British North America Act, on March 29. The new Dominion would be launched on July 1, 1867. To Macdonald’s admirers, he was “the artificer in chief,” the vital craftsman without whom Confederation could not have happened. Others resented his primacy. Cartier had run huge risks managing “the fears, prejudices and jealousies of a proud and sensitive population” to bring French Canada into Confederation. Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s second prime minister, gave the credit for securing Upper Canadian support to his idol, George Brown. Just as John A. Macdonald had hijacked the clergy reserves issue, so he stole Confederation too. “Having no great work of his own to boast about, he bravely plucks the laurel from the brows of the actual combatants and real victors, and fastens it on his own head.” This was unfair: Macdonald believed in Confederation, even if he was not starry-eyed about the challenge of joining Canada to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, with their small populations and sluggish economies. When a supporter rejoiced that Confederation would free Upper Canadians from the “financial millstone” of French Canada, Macdonald sharply retorted: “Do you think you will be better off with three mill-stones around your neck instead of one?”

As leader of the British North American delegations creating a new nation, John A. Macdonald was working “from morning till night” in London through the winter of 1866–67. Yet, intriguingly, he also managed to get married. People fall in love at the most unexpected moments in life, so maybe there is no mystery about a widower of fifty-two finding himself suddenly swept away by a young woman twenty-two years his junior. Somehow he found time, during one of the busiest periods of his life, to woo Miss Agnes Bernard, and hurry her to the altar. According to a well-informed early biographer, Macdonald proposed shortly before Christmas, but he mentioned no engagement when he wrote to his sister Louisa on December 27. Agnes probably accepted him early in January, and she became Mrs. John A. Macdonald on February 16, 1867.

Reared among Jamaica’s privileged white minority, Agnes Bernard had come to Canada at seventeen. In 1858, her brother Hewitt became Macdonald’s private secretary, and Agnes accompanied him, first to Toronto and then to Quebec City. Nicknamed “Pug,” she was “clever, accomplished, and handsome” — but nobody called this rigidly serious young woman pretty. Agnes was a political groupie, sometimes following Assembly debates from the gallery: when she married, Gowan concluded that “the voice of the Chamber has indeed beguiled her.” Macdonald had met her, but he kept a certain social distance from his secretary. In 1865, Agnes and her mother moved to England. Macdonald encountered them taking a stroll in London’s West End one evening late in 1866. Since Hewitt Bernard was the conference secretary, their paths would probably have crossed anyway.

During his nine years as a widower, there had been rumours that John A. Macdonald would marry again, but he preferred the solitary life that had characterized much of his first marriage anyway. He felt crowded when a male relative visited him in Quebec in 1861. “I am now so much accustomed to live alone, that it frets me to have a person always in the same house with me.” He may not have been entirely celibate. “We speak not of Mr. Macdonald’s private life,” the Globe had thundered with menacing hint as it denounced his drunkenness in 1866. The next year, an eccentric opponent listed adultery among his many sins. Yet, suddenly, he was married.

John A. Macdonald’s second wife, Agnes Bernard, married him in 1867. “She had a good deal to put up with.”

Courtesy of Topley Studio Fonds/Library and Archives Canada/PA-025366.

Late on December 11, 1866, a grey winter day, the delegates had returned to London after visiting Lord Carnarvon’s country mansion (“one of the swellest places in England,” Macdonald called it). To keep warm in his hotel room, Macdonald donned two nightshirts and then, as was his habit, he propped himself up in bed to read a newspaper. Tired from travel, he nodded off, dropping the paper on to a bedside candle. He was “awakened by intense heat” to find his bed on fire. “I didn’t lose my presence of mind,” he boasted. After emptying his water jug on to the flames, he ripped open the singed pillows, “poured an avalanche of feathers on the blazing mass, & then stamped out the fire with my hands & feet.” Fearful that his mattress might still be smouldering, he roused Cartier and Galt from their adjoining bedrooms, and they brought their water jugs to soak his bed. Only then did he realize he was badly burned. Macdonald “very nearly lost his life,” wrote Galt, and the victim agreed, “my escape was miraculous.”

Significantly, the three decided to keep quiet about the episode. However, despite Macdonald’s attempt to shrug off his injuries, he was confined to the hotel on doctor’s orders, celebrating Christmas Day with tea and toast when its catering facilities shut down. There was no suggestion that he had been drunk, but when a man with a notorious alcohol problem catches fire in bed, speculation is obvious. If John A. Macdonald aimed to become Canada’s first prime minister, he needed a twenty-four hour guard — and that meant finding a wife, fast.

Hewitt Bernard was appalled to learn that his boss aimed to become his brother-in-law. To his credit, he put his loyalty to Agnes first, claiming later that “he did everything he could to dissuade his sister from the marriage.” Macdonald assured Bernard that “there could only be one objection; and he had promised reformation in that respect.” Here was a dangerous ambiguity: was Macdonald taking a wife to fight his alcohol problem, or giving up drink to get married? Agnes was thirty, the age when cruel chauvinism branded a single woman a failure in the marriage stakes. A strong believer in duty, she knew that she was taking on not just a husband but a job. In a stilted and sporadic diary that she later kept in Ottawa, she called herself “a great Premier’s wife.”

The wedding took place at very short notice. Macdonald claimed that the ceremony was hurried on so that Agnes could be presented to Queen Victoria, but it is equally likely that he needed to demonstrate possession of a wife to become Canada’s first prime minister. The fashionable church of St George’s, Hanover Square, was packed with friends of Canada: three of the four bridesmaids were delegates’ daughters, giving the marriage the flavour of a dynastic alliance. As the couple took their vows, “a bright ray of sunshine fell through the fine old stained glass windows,” lighting the scene in a happy omen. At the wedding breakfast, the bridegroom delivered a “brilliant speech,” playing on the joke that he was applying the political principle of uniting the provinces to his domestic life — “Confederation, under a female sovereign.” The couple’s health was toasted by elder statesman Francis Hincks. Twelve years earlier, Macdonald had denounced him as “steeped to the lips in corruption.” Now Hincks presented Agnes with a valuable diamond and pearl bracelet. The couple headed for a two-day honeymoon in Oxford: Macdonald was needed in London when the Confederation legislation came before Parliament.

The newlyweds were “kept in England by some Canadian business,” which included a special audience with Queen Victoria, who praised the loyalty of her transatlantic subjects and the “very important measure” of Confederation. The prime minister-designate formally replied that Canadians had declared “in the most solemn & emphatic manner our resolve to be under the sovereignty of Your Majesty and your family forever.” It was early May before the couple returned to Ottawa. On his first Monday back at work, Macdonald held a celebration luncheon. An Ottawa diarist was “very much disturbed” to learn that “John A. was carried out of the lunch room ... hopelessly drunk.” “What a prospect Mrs. John A. has before her!”