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CHAPTER ONE

Leader in Trouble

1

That year, New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday, and there were no papers out on the quiet streets of Toronto, sparkling in bright snow and sunlight. Down town on King Street the Globe office stood shuttered and deserted, as church-goers hurried by to morning services. Its proprietor, George Brown, the Reform political leader, was no doubt at Knox Church himself that morning, and home afterwards with his parents to spend the rest of the day in proper Scots fashion, welcoming New Year’s callers to the Church Street house. But when at last the bell on St. Lawrence Hall announced to a frozen midnight that the first day of 1860 was ended, then the nearby premises of the Toronto Globe came suddenly to life. The Sabbath was over; the gaslight blazed; the presses pounded. Brown had his regular New Year survey to produce, already set up before the holiday, and his journal always came out on time. By 4:00 a.m. it was done. The carts were at the door for the opening issue of 1860. The citizens of Toronto – and, by Grand Trunk, Great Western, and Northern railways, the people of Canada West – would soon read the prognostications of the most powerful newspaper in British North America: George Brown’s Globe.

What were the prospects for the year to come? What might the 1860s bring to the United Province of Canada? The Globe was wisely circumspect as it viewed the horizons. “Who can tell,” it propounded cautiously, “that in 1859 some seed was not sown which, as the years roll round will gradually develop to the glory or dishonour of our province.”¹ Some seeds, indeed, were obvious to speculate upon. There was the policy that had been adopted under Brown’s leadership at the huge Reform party convention in Toronto, back in November, which called for the federation of the two sections of the province, Canada East and Canada West, to end their angry conflict within the existing Canadian union. There was, besides, the plan put forward by the governing Liberal-Conservative Coalition for a federal union of all the provinces of British North America. But months earlier the government had virtually abandoned as premature the idea of a general confederation, had dropped it into the limbo of pious wishes. And the Reform opposition’s proposal for a dual federation had yet to meet its test in parliament. None could say which seed might grow, to transform the small colonial world of Canada within the years ahead.

At least the outlook in the world abroad seemed promising. In Russia, old Crimean War enemy, a reforming Czar was occupied with freeing the serfs; there, undoubtedly, liberty and progress were sweeping forward. In France, Napoleon III had evidently given up the quest for glory that had led him into war with Austria for the liberation of Italy, and bloodied 1859 with the mass slaughter of Magenta and Solferino. As for Great Britain, it now appeared that she had fully recovered from the double blows of trade depression and the Indian Mutiny. Once more she stood at the peak of industrial and imperial supremacy. Victoria’s wide empire, the Globe assured its readers, was stable and secure about the world.

Canadians that January might well congratulate themselves on the comforting solidity of the Victorian empire – at least, whenever they looked south across their borders to a sorely troubled United States. The republic was still deep in the storm let loose by John Brown’s wild raid on Harper’s Ferry, in a fanatic, futile attempt to raise a slave revolt in Virginia. The would-be liberator had been hanged only a few weeks before, and all the violent passions of the conflict over slavery had raged about his death. He was hero and martyr to Northern abolitionists: madman and monster to Southern slave-holders. His soul assuredly would go marching on – in an abolitionist crusading song that rang ominously with the tramp of armies.

From Canada, the Toronto Globe regarded the bitter American controversy with keen sympathy for the cause of abolitionism. Its owner, after all, was a prominent member of the city’s vigorous Anti-Slavery Society. Nevertheless, his paper recognized that the Harper’s Ferry raid had been hopelessly misguided; and George Brown had himself obtained a legal opinion from Oliver Mowat, his close colleague in the Reform party and associate in the Anti-Slavery Society, affirming that the charge of treason against the raiders would have been upheld in Canadian courts.² Whatever the rights of the case, the future looked grim enough for the United States. “We take our leave of 1859,” the Globe sombrely closed its survey of the American scene, “with threats of disunion ringing in our ears.”³

Compared with the sectional strife in the American union, the problems facing Canada looked by no means so explosive. Yet here, too – as Brown and the Globe would emphasize – the Canadian union that had been formed in 1841 from the two old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada was racked with sectional discord. Canada West and East were not just halves of the United Province. They were still Upper and Lower Canada to their inhabitants; two widely divergent communities, the one dominated by English-speaking Protestants, the other by French-speaking Roman Catholics, and effectively divided within a common frame of government by the scheme of equal representation that gave the same number of parliamentary seats to each section. The discord between them had reached new heights of vehemence during 1859. It showed no sign of lessening, as Upper Canadians hotly denounced what they regarded as eastern domination of the union, and Lower Canadians grimly resisted any change that might place them in the power of a hostile West.

As the western Reform organ sharply presented it, the chief British province in America lay divided, distracted, and cast down.⁴ A good harvest had helped the slow and partial recovery from the severe depression of 1857-8; yet it seemed that the heady, boundless optimism of the railway boom of the earlier fifties would never return. Railways had been built; population and economic complexity had grown; but a disappointed, disunited Canada was still little more than a thin margin of settlement in the enormous wilderness of British America. And yet, in spite of every problem, Brown’s Globe looked forward manfully to the 1860s. “Our belief,” it said conclusively, “that Canada contains within herself elements of progress which will yet place her among the foremost nations of the world, is not one jot abated.”⁵ Was this that wishful thinking called nationalism, which still might put its mark upon the next decade?

A time of the making of nations. Though this was barely foreshadowed, such would the sixties be. In Europe, a united Italy would arise from the bravura of Garibaldi and the calculations of Cavour, even as Bismarck worked towards that German national unity destined to upset the power balance of the world. In the United States, nationalism would triumph, in appalling cost of civil war, and establish the modern centralized republic. And in British North America itself, internal crisis and external threat, dreams and near-desperation, would at last move the provinces into a federal union, the broad continental basis for a Canadian nation-state. There were transforming years ahead, and they would work upon George Brown. The strongest exponent of Upper Canada sectionalism would become an all important builder of the new national design. The moulder and leader of the Clear Grit Reform party of Canada West would exercise a potent influence on Liberalism in the federal Dominion to be proclaimed in 1867. But in the more immediate future lay fresh political defeats and hard new personal trials. Like any other man, Brown was the more fortunate not to see ahead too clearly.

Not that he would have felt great need of foreknowledge: “Sufficient unto the day” had always been his motto. Now, as 1860 opened, he showed no real anxiety for great events impending, good or bad. He was attending closely to the Globe, preparing hopefully for the next political campaign, rejoicing at the re-election of Toronto’s Reform mayor, Adam Wilson. Quite probably he went a few days later to nearby Newmarket, to stand with party stalwarts in a swirling snow-storm as Wilson was also declared victor in the North York by-election, which was held to fill the parliamentary vacancy left by the death of old Joseph Hartman, one of the early Clear Grit Liberals.⁶

Perhaps, as well, he improved his otherwise hard-working bachelor existence with evenings at the winter lecture series in St. Lawrence Hall, where distinguished visitors such as Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson were currently enlightening Toronto society. At any rate, he was there to introduce Greeley’s address on “Great Men”.⁷ And his massive six-foot figure loomed up as familiarly among the lecture-going élite at St. Lawrence Hall, at the Music Hall, or at the Lyceum, as it did in the busy crowd on King Street, when he strode along to the Globe office or the St. Charles restaurant, long arms swinging, a ready smile for an acquaintance on his eager, expressive face. He was forty-one. His red hair was fading somewhat into brown, and had sufficiently receded that a hostile observer could unkindly term him “a hungry-looking, bald-headed individual”.⁸ Still, Brown’s long, strong features, powerful jaw, and piercing blue eyes might well have appeared hungry-looking to the aforesaid observer (one Captain Rhys), seeing that the Captain’s calm proposal that the Globe print his theatrical posters on credit had been indignantly rejected.⁹

In fact, however, Brown was his old vigorous self: decided in his likes and dislikes, equally decided in revealing them. There was no guile in his make-up; and his normal good nature, transparent kindness, and cheerful laughter far outbalanced his sudden bursts of indignation or the aggressive urgency and fervour of his will. His was a forthright, frank simplicity, ruled by a powerful conscience and quick emotions. “Do as you feel right,” he said, “and you will be sure to be right.”¹⁰ Of course he could be fiercely uncompromising, imperious, dogmatic. But he was loved and admired by his personal friends and political followers; and there were few indeed of his enemies who did not feel a deep, reluctant respect for him.

His health now appeared fully recovered after the exhaustion and depression of the preceding summer. His optimism and cheerful self-assurance were wholly restored. In short, this much was certain: that as George Brown moved forward into a new era, his confidence in the future was – in the Globe’s own announcement – “not one jot abated”.

2

Brown had more to announce that January in his paper. He had been busy for weeks at the office on the latest large-scale project to improve the Globe, and the journal bowed in the new year in what it modestly called “the handsomest new dress yet”.¹¹ This was the result of a new font of copper-faced type, of the most modern cut, specially cast for it by James Connor and Sons of New York.¹² Henceforth Brown could crowd still more into the Globe’s four large pages of nine columns each, yet still keep them legible and attractive. More notable still, he had bought a second big double-cylinder Taylor press. Each of them could print 3,000 sheets an hour; and he had the only two in the British provinces. To complement the presses he had installed a remarkable new folding machine from Philadelphia, as used in some of the larger American printing offices, that could fold the sheets as fast as the Taylor presses could throw them off. The Globe could now print, fold, and mail 3,000 papers an hour with only six employees in the press room, most of them boys. The new machinery, Brown calculated, should save enough to pay its cost within a year.¹³ He was really ushering in the age of the big mechanized press in Canada – although the conservative-minded printers’ trade would prove none too appreciative of his policy.¹⁴

In part the pressure of circulation, and in part the hope for more, had dictated this large investment in improvement. The Globe’s daily, tri-weekly, and weekly editions now sold well over 20,000 copies.¹⁵ Before the following year was out, they would claim more than 30,000.¹⁶ This, in a city of some 40,000 people and an Upper Canada of approximately a million and a quarter, was a significant figure indeed, especially when the newspaper “clubs” across the West passed each copy of the Globe from hand to hand among a devout body of the faithful. Moreover, the influence of the country’s largest newspaper was vital to George Brown’s political career. Hence politics as well as business impelled his new programme of expansion, venturesome as it might be in such dull times. Yet it had always worked before. Better facilities and faster publication would stimulate greater circulation, while greater circulation would bring more advertising revenue to meet the costs – and still wider public influence for the Globe.

In any case, the paper was still Brown’s first love, whatever he might do himself in politics as leader of Upper Canada’s Reform party. Of course, by this time his role on the Globe was far removed from the personal journalism of an earlier day. He was the newspaper publisher, the director of a major business enterprise, not the editor-proprietor who virtually produced a journal on his own, as he and his father, Peter, had done when the Globe first began, over a decade before. Now he employed a sizeable staff of editorial writers and reporters, all under the efficient supervision of his sensitive, keen-minded brother, Gordon. For some years past, in fact, it had been Gordon’s distinguished and dependable talents as an editor that had largely enabled George Brown to carry on his parliamentary career.¹⁷

Yet – as now – whenever George was home in Toronto, he was back again at the Globe office: up in the third-floor editorial rooms in shirt-sleeves, bristling with enthusiasms, full of expansive gestures, and frequently smudged with printer’s ink from the sheaves of sticky proofs he fingered. His parliamentary life still seemed a temporary avocation, however pressing it might grow at times. He stepped back easily and whole-heartedly into editorial writing and direction, and, above all, into the making of policy. Indeed, the major matters of policy and business management had never left his hands.¹⁸ The Globe’s present programme of expansion was decidedly his own.

It had been no light matter for Brown to undertake costly improvements in the paper at this moment, not merely because of the still-lingering depression, but because another of his loves, his estate at Both well in Kent County, also insistently demanded money. He had found it hard enough to hold on to his extensive property in Upper Canada’s far south-west. The lack of cash available in the bad times, and his inability to collect debts owed to him on his lands, had forced him to give some of it up. Only that January he advertised the cabinet factory at Bothwell for sale, and with it an assortment of completed furniture valued at $10,000.¹⁹ Still, he clung to his farm and village lots, his sawmills, and his timber interests there.

American lumber dealers, moreover, had promised him good prices for all the sawn hardwood his mills could deliver through the winter.²⁰ Accordingly, in mid-December the “Laird of Bothwell” had made a brief trip to Montreal in order to arrange a bank credit of $20,000 to finance the season’s operations. There he had opened negotiations through Luther Holton, his old friend and fellow-Liberal prominent in Montreal business circles, and had finally obtained the necessary credit from Edmunstone, Allan and Company, a commercial house accustomed to these transactions in the lumber trade. Brown had to mortgage his Bothwell property and agree to pay back the funds advanced as the proceeds from his lumber sales came in.²¹ But he now could saw some four or five million feet of hardwood. And so his mills were steaming full blast as the winter wore on. It was a large undertaking, but the chance seemed good that he could sustain his Bothwell interests successfully.

He had quite a different sort of interest far to the north-west. Here lay that spacious inland empire beyond the Lakes which the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled, and which George Brown strenuously urged Canada to acquire. He and his journal had eagerly supported Toronto’s efforts to open effective communications with the North West, to extend Upper Canadian interests westward and to make the city the metropolis of a vast new hinterland. Brown still hoped for great things from the North West Transportation Company, founded in Toronto by a group of leading business men, including several of his Liberal associates. And though its promoters had so far had little return from their attempts to develop the transit trade across the Upper Lakes, the Globe in January of 1860 was confidently predicting imperial assistance for the company and declaring that these “pioneers of modern northwestern enterprise” would yet obtain a contract to carry the mails as far as the Pacific slopes of British Columbia.²²

Be that as it may, another Toronto venture into the North West had apparently succeeded. At the Red River, the one pocket of settlement in the Hudson’s Bay territory, two young Toronto journalists, William Buckingham and William Coldwell, had recently established the first newspaper in the inland country. Their Nor’Wester would agitate for the annexation of the western lands to Canada, and it was not surprising that the Globe should run frequent excerpts from its pages. Buckingham, indeed, had been Brown’s prize parliamentary reporter before going west, and Coldwell would be received into the Globe staff on his return from distant Red River.²³

The two had journeyed to the Hudson’s Bay territory the previous autumn, travelling overland from St. Paul, Minnesota, by Red River cart, their precious type and press in a wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen. The Globe fully reported all their adventures: the passages through river, swamp, and prairie fire, and the near-disaster at the outset, when their oxen ran away with the wagon and spent an entire day lumbering in a mad circuit around St. Paul before the men were able to catch them.²⁴ But at length the pioneer printers had reached the Red River and set up shop. On January 26, 1860, when the north-western mails were in, the Globe proudly presented the contents of the first issue of the Nor’Wester.

The issue also provided a noteworthy disclosure, which came in a published letter from A. K. Isbister, the Red River’s expatriate son in England, who for years had been lobbying at the Colonial Office for the ending of Hudson’s Bay rule. Isbister reported gleanings from an interview he had had with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, till lately the Colonial Secretary. It seemed that when George Etienne Cartier, the Liberal-Conservative premier of Canada, had recently visited England, he had persuaded Lytton that the annexation of the North West to Canada was inconceivable. “He told him very frankly that, as the head of the Lower Canada party, any proposal of the kind would meet with his determined opposition – as it would be putting a political extinguisher on the party and the province he represented.”²⁵ Here was plain indication that Lower Canadian fears of being swamped by an expanding Upper Canada were preventing the acquisition of the North West – that Lower Canada most decidedly was directing the government of the United Province in its own sectional interest!

One might note, of course, that the report of what Cartier had said was at least third-hand, that Lytton would hardly have conveyed Cartier’s words direct to Isbister, and that even if this were the view of the Lower Canadian government leader, it was no more sectional than the belief among Upper Canadians that gaining the North West would markedly enhance their own strength and influence. These, however, were not the Globe’s concerns. What was important was north-western expansion in itself; and whether Isbister’s story stemmed from Colonial Office gossip or not, it seemed sharply to illuminate the Canadian government’s apathy in regard to the North West.

Obviously, the ministry had hung back. Its Upper Canadian members might make resounding speeches to their constituents on expansion; the cabinet might talk of western boundary claims and send an exploring party to the Hudson’s Bay territory; but these were mere sops to Upper Canada. The Liberal-Conservative ministers had taken no effective steps to secure the North West. Instead they had passed quibbling resolutions through the Assembly to evade the Colonial Office’s proposal that Canada test her claim to the territory in the courts, and had rejected any other action as premature. In all this, Lower Canada’s antipathy to westward expansion had been more than suspected. But now – now here was a vivid illustration of how its power in the Canadian union flatly prohibited a vital advance.

That was enough for the Globe. Cartier might also have told Lytton (so Isbister had added) that he could conceive of a separate province being erected in the North West which might some day form part of a British North American federation. Yet to Brown and his journal this was all one with the ministry’s shelved policy of confederation – a useful dodge, a vague, high-sounding reference to the indefinite future, invoked when necessary to avoid practical action now. The paper saw the meaning before it quite simply: “The North West territory lies open before us – a field white for the harvest. We must not enter upon it; Lower Canadian interests forbid it.”²⁶

It was just one more aspect of Lower Canadian domination: the baneful consequence of a union based on equal parliamentary representation, which prevented the more populous Upper Canada from exercising its proper weight of numbers, while effectively throwing the balance of power to the close-knit French-Canadian community of Lower Canada. “Both the British and French in Lower Canada persist in ruling us,” the Globe added bitterly.²⁷ The English minority in the East were in the main as guilty, since they had helped to maintain Lower Canadian ascendancy for their own commercial reasons, and ridden rough-shod over western rights. Worst of all, however, were those Upper Canadian supporters of the governing coalition, the Conservative forces led by John A. Macdonald – mere hired “sepoys” in George Brown’s opinion.²⁸ For they had sold out their own community for government posts and patronage, and a share in the iniquitous régime.

In short, to Brown and his journal, the failure to open the North West was only a further sign of the power of Lower Canada over the present Canadian union. It was only part of a malign pattern of politics that imposed high tariffs, compensation for French-Canadian seigneurial rights, ruinous Grand Trunk railway bills, separate-school measures – and always the reign of extravagance and venality – on an Upper Canadian majority in complete defiance of its will. The whole thing was insufferable! The union must be changed! Changed to a federal form that would give each Canada a government of its own to look after its essential interests, while leaving matters of joint concern to a central authority. This was the moral and the message that the Globe once more pressed upon its followers as the winter days wore on. Plainly the political pot was coming to the boil again, as Brown briskly reheated the whole issue of constitutional change.

3

Another parliamentary session was approaching. Upper Canada’s Liberals had to be prepared to push their fundamental answer to the problems of the union, the resolutions adopted by the Toronto Convention of 1859 for a federation of the two Canadas. The Constitutional Reform Association set up at that great November meeting was busy reorganizing the party for victory, rebuilding Reform committees from the central executive in Toronto to the farthest outlying township. At the Association’s headquarters on Melinda Street, Brown and Oliver Mowat worked closely with its enterprising secretary, William McDougall, drafting the formal address that was designed to lay the Convention platform before the people and urge them to petition parliament on its behalf.²⁹ And then on February 15, Brown and his Toronto party colleagues met as the central executive committee, to approve with due solemnity the completed Address of the Constitutional Reform Association.³⁰

As printed and circulated throughout the West, its four giant sheets were packed with small type and statistics, under heavy black headings that variously proclaimed: “In justice to Upper Canada in Parliamentary Representation – Upper Canada Pays Seventy Per Cent of the National Taxation – Lower Canada Rules Upper Canada Even in Local Matters”, and finally, “The True Remedy” – the Reform Convention’s plan.³¹ The plan, however, was given in little more detail than in the original key resolution passed by that body, which had called for separate provincial governments to control “all matters of a local or sectional character” and for “some joint authority” to deal with affairs in common.³²

The vagueness of that latter phrase had, of course, been necessitated at the Convention by the widespread sentiment among its back-bench members for a peremptory dissolution of the union, “pure and simple”. Those who, like Brown, recognized the fundamental value of a union of the Canadas – whatever the faults of the existing one – had been forced to minimize the role of any new central government in order to bring the dissolutionists to accept a policy of federation. It was still wise not to say too much about the policy that might rouse the “pure and simple” faction still strong in the agrarian West beyond Toronto. It was best, in fact, to present grievances in detail and federal union only in principle.

Nevertheless, the Constitutional Reform Address did state that the functions of the proposed joint authority should be “clearly laid down – let its powers be strictly confined to specified duties”. Furthermore, the written constitution that would define the limits of federal authority was to forbid the central government to incur new debt or increase taxes beyond the level necessary to meet existing obligations and discharge its specific functions. Even though the central power was not spelled out, therefore, Brown, Mowat, McDougall, and the other Toronto leaders clearly envisaged a sharply limited federation. They were not just seeking to appease dissolutionists in the party. Concerned as they were with Upper Canada’s rights, and alarmed as they were by the present piling up of public debt, it was only natural that they should place their main emphasis on new provincial governments that were to be as inexpensive and as close to the people as possible.

The grand Address was warmly hailed by the Reform press across the West. Excitement and hope rose quickly to a peak, as the Globe ran the whole thing as a supplement on February 22, and again went through the case for constitutional change. Parliament was only days away; the Address promised that a vigorous effort would be made to secure the Convention plan once the legislature gathered in Quebec on the twenty-eighth. After four years in Toronto, the travelling capital of the United Province had now returned to the eastern city, to stay until the buildings at the newly chosen permanent seat of government, Ottawa, had been completed. This might take some time yet: the Minister of Public Works, John Rose, had only recently turned a frozen sod (with difficulty) to mark the beginning of Ottawa’s expensive edifices.³³ Accordingly, George Brown once more set out for a session in Quebec, a day or so before its opening, with the prime aim of pursuing there the policy of the Reform Convention and Address.

Essentially it was his programme. True, William McDougall, one of the best minds in the party, had moved the crucial resolution for a joint authority at the Toronto Convention, and much of the Address had come from his hand. Staid but capable Oliver Mowat was no less thoroughly behind it. But it was Brown beyond all others who had swung western Reformers from their earlier insistence on representation by population to the remedy of federation, and away from dissolution of the union – Brown who had worked to save both the unity of his party and the unity of the St. Lawrence lands through a federal plan for Canada. His own future as party leader and the future of Upper Canada Liberalism were tied to the Convention scheme. A great deal could turn on the course of events at Quebec.

Aboard the clattering Grand Trunk, as Brown weighed the possibilities, he could hardly have expected to pass his plan on its first introduction into parliament. His Liberal-Conservative opponents were in power, after all. They controlled a safe majority of seats in the House, and had done so ever since the failure of that brief Reform fling at power, the Brown-Dorion ministry of 1858. Furthermore, the two segments of the Liberal opposition, Brown’s own Upper Canada contingent and the Rouges of Lower Canada under Antoine Aimé Dorion, had known anything but close relations since their disputes over compensation for seigneurial rights during the session of 1859. At its end, they had been left virtually separate, if co-belligerent, bodies. Nevertheless, Brown had kept the friendship and sympathy of the two chief eastern Liberal figures – the judicious, high-minded Dorion, and that lively, irrepressible Irishman, D’Arcy McGee. Moreover, through his intimacy with Luther Holton, an astute and influential Liberal partisan in Montreal, he had another close channel of communication with the Rouges, even though Holton had not yet re-entered parliament since his defeat two years before.

It did seem possible, at least, that Rouges and Brownite Reformers could combine behind a demand for federating the two Canadas. It was Dorion who had first raised the idea in parliament in 1856. And, shortly before the Upper Canada Reform Convention of 1859 had gathered, the Liberal M.P.s of Lower Canada had met in their own caucus to hear a report drafted first by Holton and signed by four prominent parliamentary members (Dorion, McGee, Dessaulles, and Drummond), recommending that federation of the two Canadas become their party’s policy.³⁴ The report was not officially adopted; and certainly the small eastern caucus was not the counterpart of the western mass party gathering. Still, it was evident that the Rouge leaders themselves looked to federation, and reasonable to believe that they could bring most or many of their followers to its support. Further still, other members of the House who were dissatisfied with the government’s own lack of clear-cut policy, though uncertain yet of an alternative, might also be won over to the idea of a federalized Canadian union, if it could gain a strong vote in parliament.

That was the true consideration: not necessarily to defeat the ministry and carry the Convention plan at first try but to get a strong vote for it. Then it might build up in the House. Then it might win the next election, and carry a new parliament in its favour. But the first essential for a strong vote lay in the united support of the Upper Canada Reformers themselves. And it was by no means assured that George Brown’s own followers in the Assembly would stay solidly behind him on this question.

Really, the western party front had only been formed three years earlier, from Liberal factions that had joined in the “Reform Alliance” under Brown’s strong impetus and carried the elections of 1857-8 in Upper Canada. He had undoubtedly had to use all his skill and forcefulness to keep the factions together at the Convention of 1859. Perhaps, indeed, the apparent unity of Reform (with no government patronage to weld it) was largely a tribute to his forcefulness – and to the persuasive publicity of the Globe. Yet there still existed three main elements within Upper Canada Reform: Clear Grit radicalism, whose roots were deep in the agrarian western peninsula; Brownite Liberalism, focused on Toronto though spread across the West; and “moderate” Reformism, more in evidence eastward from the city, and particularly in the constituencies along the Upper St. Lawrence River, a region dominated by the proud and prickly John Sandfield Macdonald, who before Brown’s rise had been the top contender for party leadership.

Of these three factions, the Brownite Liberals had plainly become the strongest: that group best characterized by its unwavering devotion to the pronouncements and principles of the Globe. In fact, the acceptance of Brown as party leader by radicals to the left and moderates to the right was above all a recognition of the predominance of his own faithful following. Clear Grit radicalism, moreover, had been successfully held under control by the Toronto Brownite leaders, a fact marked at the Convention by the defeat of radical hopes for dissolution and “organic changes” – the remaking of the constitution on the American pattern of elective, democratic institutions.

The old drive of Grit agrarian democracy in truth had lost much force. The original Clear Grit champions had either withdrawn from politics, like John Rolph and William Lyon Mackenzie, or grown progressively more moderate, like William McDougall and Malcolm Cameron. They had found no real successors. The most promising new radical spokesman, the journalist George Sheppard, had been outplayed at the Convention and effectively muzzled thereafter in his writings for the Globe.³⁵ The unhappy Sheppard had departed the Globe office in January of 1860 (with a bland farewell editorial of praise written by George Brown) to take more congenial employment on the Hamilton Times.³⁶ He was soon to leave an unresponsive Canada for the United States. It seemed he lacked the courage of his political convictions; he had chopped and changed about, and always it was the party or the country that had failed him. Able as he was, Sheppard did not have the fibre for consistent leadership.

Thus, lacking real direction, radicalism had become subdued. Increasingly its adherents were merging into the Brownite Liberal following. Thus, too, the Globe at last grew willing to use the name “Clear Grit” for the whole Upper Canada Reform party.³⁷ Initially the term distinguished the radical faction alone, whose American democratic tendencies the Globe had fervently deplored. It was the Liberal-Conservative press that had freely applied “Clear Grit” to the general mass of Western Reformers, helpfully implying that they were all ultras and republicans at heart, while Brown’s journal had naturally shunned the title for that very reason. But now the name was safe enough. The Upper Canada Liberals could be “the Grits” henceforth, as far as the Globe was concerned.

Nevertheless, the old Grit radicalism had by no means wholly disappeared; and, in particular, the dissolutionist sentiment with which it had been associated was still a powerful undercurrent in western popular feeling. Should federation not look strong in parliament, therefore, dissolutionism might surge forth in Upper Canada once more. Western impatience might yet threaten Liberal unity with a radical revival on the left. Brown could not wholly dismiss that possibility.

More possible at the moment, however, was a party split on the right. Moderate Reformers in Upper Canada still toyed with the idea of applying representation by population, or the double majority (Sandfield Macdonald’s pet scheme), to the existing union. They might have been swept along by the Convention’s uproarious acceptance of the joint authority principle, yet afterwards they wondered if so great a change were really necessary. Some moderate politicians such as Michael Foley might even have worked with Brown throughout the party meeting, but this rather in an effort to avoid the still more drastic policy of dissolution than from any ardent desire for federal union.³⁸ Furthermore, there were a few moderate M.P.s, such as Sandfield Macdonald, who had not attended the Convention at all and could well consider themselves not bound by it. For the party democracy had little coercive power over the loose parliamentary Reform front of that day.

Moderates, too, the true descendants of Francis Hincks, were often inclined to that worthy’s view that it was more important to have a winning Liberal government than a losing Liberal principle. Here was further cause to wonder whether they would shy from Brown’s direction if he pushed them too fast at the federation hurdle in parliament. Actually this right wing was the smallest of the three elements in Upper Canada Reform. Hence the party leader could reasonably count on holding behind him a large majority of western Liberal members, of the left as well as the centre. But would this be enough? Could he afford any split at all, or even rumours of dissension within his party’s ranks? What then would happen to a strong vote for federation – to the Convention policy and his leadership? These were the problems George Brown brought with him when he finally arrived in Quebec for the ticklish session of 1860.

4

Temporary accommodation had been prepared for the provincial parliament until the new Ottawa capital was ready. The buildings previously provided for the legislature in the old French city had been destroyed by fire: both the former Lower Canada parliament buildings and their successors. (Incidentally, the Governor-General’s residence, Spencer Wood, also burned down the night after the session of 1860 opened, to round out a distinctly gloomy record.)³⁹ Yet the temporary arrangements made for parliament seemed quite satisfactory – in a brand new building that would become the post office when the capital had moved. It stood on a commanding eminence near the Prescott Gate, looking down the great sweep of the ice-bound St. Lawrence; a plain but ample structure with a front of the best white brick, its more humble red-brick rear plastered over to match.⁴⁰

Inside, the Assembly chamber was shorter but broader than that in Toronto.⁴¹ It was embellished with portraits of past speakers, hung on the front of narrow galleries that ran around three sides. The one hundred and thirty members arrayed below – sixty-five from each section – were seated much as in Toronto. Premier Cartier, galvanically active, and his Minister of Finance, portly Alexander Galt, shared a desk in the front rank on the government side; the mass of Cartier’s Bleu supporters from Lower Canada ranged behind them. As leader of the Upper Canadian half of the cabinet, John A. Macdonald also had a desk in the front row. Here was the master-politician, still Brown’s greatest foe – easy, smiling, and adroit, and as deadly effective as ever.

On the opposite side of the House, Brown and Dorion also shared a front-row desk, as the opposition leaders of West and East. Foley and McDougall were in the same line, Mowat behind Brown and Dorion, McGee and Sandfield Macdonald somewhat more removed. The opposition forces comprised some forty-nine members: thirty-four of them Upper Canada Reformers, ten Rouges, and the remainder, more independent Liberals from Lower Canada. The ministerial side numbered about seventy-five: thirty-three being French-Canadian Bleus; sixteen, English-speaking Lower Canadians; twenty-three, John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives from Upper Canada; and the rest, the few western Coalition Liberals remaining with the government.⁴² It was hard to define the fringes remaining on either side, however. In those days of weaker party discipline there were usually quite a number of uncertain votes, as the independent or converted, or the merely disappointed, shifted back and forth. Hence Macdonald’s manoeuvring and managing abilities were at such a premium; and hence George Brown might hope to gain significant additions in a well-staged vote on federation.

The opening ceremonies went off smoothly on February 28. The day was wonderfully warm and sunny, and melting waters gushed down the steep and narrow roadways of Quebec.⁴³ The Speech from the Throne, read by Governor-General Sir Edmund Head, held no surprises. The forthcoming visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was officially announced for the summer. The rest was serene platitude, with no mention of the general British North American union that the government had once proposed. The House trooped back into its own chamber, fussily marshalled into place by the Speaker, Henry Smith, a perfect zealot for dress and drill who performed at the opening in lace ruffles at neck and wrist – and had ordered a fullbottomed wig from England.⁴⁴ Then, as soon as they were settled, Brown rose to give a formal notice of motion. On the earliest day possible, he announced briskly, he would move two resolutions, the first and fifth adopted at the recent Reform Convention in Toronto, declaring that the existing legislative union of the Canadas had failed, and demanding federation under a joint authority in its stead.⁴⁵ There was a burst of scornful laughter from the ministerial benches, but it rapidly died out. The House adjourned soon afterwards, full of conjecture as to the outcome of Brown’s swift move.

The next morning, the first western Reform caucus of the session met behind closed doors.⁴⁶ Immediately there was trouble. Some of the moderate members expressed doubts as to the wisdom of moving the Convention resolutions in parliament directly. It was all very well, they contended, to adopt the Convention platform as a unifying statement of aims and ideals; but to press it in the existing House would be to cut off Upper Canada Reform from those who were disgusted with the present administration but not yet ready to transform the union. Far better to warn that if misgovernment did not cease the Convention plan would be insisted on. Then there would be room to compromise with potential allies and, above all, to gain more Lower Canadian support.⁴⁷

But those who held with Brown believed that the very purpose of the party was to transform the union, that misgovernment was inherent in its nature, and that further warnings were quite meaningless. Better, indeed, to push to the issue at once, and, if the first try failed, to push again – rather than postpone a test that the electorate expected, and fritter away reputation and support in chasing useless superficial compromises.⁴⁸ It was the age-old political debate between compelling principle and temporizing opportunism; or between self-defeating inflexibility and wise adjustment to realities, depending on the side one argued for.

Brown had expected trouble. There were already rumours abroad of reluctance and backsliding in some Reform circles, even as parliament assembled.⁴⁹ For that very reason, and to commit the party definitely, he had immediately given notice of his motion.⁵⁰ It was a bold move, and an imperious one. It brought an excited protest in the caucus (from those disposed in any case to hang back) that he had acted without authorization. Brown’s reply was wholly typical. Though admitting the general need for consultation, he was forthright, single-minded – and again imperious. “In this particular case,” he said emphatically, “there is no room for parley or modification – and whatever may be the result, these resolutions must be moved”⁵¹

He could also note that he was the party’s chosen leader; that the caucus had unanimously confirmed him in authority at the end of the preceding session, when he had offered to step down for any more desirable candidate;⁵² that the fullest possible party meeting had adopted the resolutions; and that, further, the party’s new official organization, the Constitutional Reform Association, had embodied them in its Address with the promise that they would be introduced in parliament. What more authorization could one possibly want? Why not act on the patently obvious?

All this was true. Unfortunately it was just as true that the Reform party organization in Upper Canada could not direct the parliamentary caucus at Quebec. The underlying rifts were there still; and Brown had not succeeded, as he had hoped, in vaulting over them in one quick leap. Furthermore, the political skills he unquestionably displayed in shaping public opinion or managing huge popular meetings did not include the restraint, finesse, and shrewd understanding of differing viewpoints that were so necessary in this affair. He could deal far better with a roaring audience of a thousand than a roomful of restless politicians. Still, for the time being the trouble was allayed. The question of authorization was let drop with Brown’s acknowledgement of its general necessity. And the resolutions were not introduced on March 5 as had been announced, on the ground that a number of the western members still had not reached Quebec.⁵³ One, John Sheridan Hogan, never did arrive. Months later his body was found in the Don River near Toronto: he had been killed in a highway robbery.⁵⁴

In any case, nothing had been settled. Brown and many with him were unshaken in their determination to bring in the constitutional resolutions. A week or two of March passed by, while parliamentary business went forward uneventfully, and the Reform opposition strove earnestly to keep its internal problems under control. Meanwhile, however, the ministerial press had picked up the scent. The Toronto Leader, chief government organ in the West, gleefully reported “a terrible row” in the Grit caucus over the resolutions and Brown’s leadership. Nothing had been heard since of his motion. “Why the delay?” it asked sweetly.⁵⁵ Furthermore, two prominent western Reform journals, the Hamilton Times and London Free Press, which the year before had questioned Brown’s suitability as leader, returned to their refrain.⁵⁶ The old “moderate” charges, in fact, were being raised again: that Brown was too extreme to head the party, that Lower Canadians would not work with him, and hence that he was keeping Liberalism out of office.

At the other, the radical, end of the scale, dissolutionists were capturing local party meetings in the western peninsula – since they found Brown’s federation policy too tame, too much concerned with maintaining ties with Lower Canada!⁵⁷ That primeval Clear Grit, Charles Clarke, was writing vigorous new Reformator letters to the press.⁵⁸ His friend George Sheppard confidently informed him, “The ‘joint authority’ commands no respect anywhere.”⁵⁹ Sheppard could perceive a dissolutionist reaction rising, and the coming overthrow of Brown. No doubt the wish bore some relation to the thought; and no doubt the lead the Hamilton Times was taking in attacking Brown bore some relation to the fact that its editor, George Sheppard, now had the chance of getting a little of his own back.

Brown was being threatened from both sides; but in Quebec the threat from the moderates seemed far more serious. It was said that five members of the Reform caucus who looked to Sandfield Macdonald would vote against the Convention resolutions if introduced.⁶⁰ The Leader heard that others would abstain.⁶¹ Foley was a dubious quantity: moderates considered him a likely successor to Brown. Malcolm Cameron had even raised his name in caucus at the end of the previous session, although Foley had then denied any desire to lead.⁶² Whether or not he had aspirations, or could be drafted, he was a natural rallying point for antagonism to the Convention plan. Foley was hearty, companionable, and clever. He had some of the charm and eloquence of his compatriot McGee, though not his breadth of intellect or force of character. Associated with him, moreover, was another prominent Reform figure, Skeffington Connor, Solicitor-General in the late Brown-Dorion government. Connor’s habit of speaking as if about to burst into tears had not made him one of the party’s best parliamentary orators;⁶³ but he was of old and respected Liberal lineage – had helped to found the Globe, in fact. In consequence, the prospect of revolt loomed large in George Brown’s party. It could very well doom the policy of federation before it even reached the House.

5

To meet the crisis, the leader called a special caucus. It sat for days through the middle of March in rooms provided at the Collège de Laval, wrangling desperately over the Convention resolutions, as the moderates again insisted on postponement in order to conciliate Lower Canada and to gain a chance at office.⁶⁴ At least, in opposing such a weak-kneed policy, Grit radicals made common cause with Brownite Liberals; and thus Brown was effectively relieved from further dangers on the left. But rebellion on the right was coming to a head. “We have had sharp work in our own ranks here,” he reported wrathfully on March 28 to Alexander Mackenzie, his old associate in Sarnia. “Sandfield Macdonald we expected nothing of, but Foley and Connor have acted badly as can be.”⁶⁵ Frightened to death at the prospect of having to declare themselves on the resolutions, they were seeking to get rid of him, to form a new “humbug alliance”. They were “snakes in the grass”, Brown fumed, “who will make their spring the first moment they dare.”⁶⁶

He sprang first. He boldly placed his resignation in the hands of the caucus, and offered to make way for a moderate to lead the party.⁶⁷ It was a flat challenge to a test of strength. He would even resign his seat, Brown said positively, if it could be shown that without him Lower Canadians would join a government based on Reform principles.⁶⁸ Thus openly confronted, the moderates rapidly gave way. They had to. They were compelled to recognize that without George Brown the Liberals had no chance at all in Upper Canada, whatever the support they might collect in Lower Canada. The moderates had to make do with Brown, because they could not do without him. He towered over all conceivable rivals in the party.

But they did not yield gracefully or willingly. Brown’s peremptory gesture of resignation was too much like pointing a gun that one knows to be loaded. It was still more like a pistol to the head when the reassured leader asked the caucus that the general declaration that he should not resign be put in the form of a definite vote of confidence, in order to stop all further dissension. At this, Sandfield Macdonald, Foley, and Connor hotly protested, and Foley and Connor marched angrily from the room.⁶⁹ Then the motion carried unanimously, even Sandfield voting for it – though the Cornwall Freeholder, his organ, ingeniously explained later that this had been tantamount to asserting that, since George Brown had got the party into such a mess, he should have the responsibility of getting them out of it!⁷⁰

Now the caucus also endorsed the Convention resolutions, although Sandfield and four others voted against them, and five would still not be committed.⁷¹ If Brown had won a victory by the end of March, it had been at grave cost. The cost was not so much in party unity, for he had confirmed his policy and his leadership, and the remaining rebels were too weak to disturb either of them in parliament. Yet this forced acknowledgement could not make the moderates warm supporters in the House; inevitably, any prospects for a strong vote on federation had been sadly damaged. Furthermore, the disagreeable Reform quarrels could not be tucked from sight. The Globe itself was forced to print a full account of the goings-on at the caucus to offset the lurid reports pieced together by the ministerial papers.⁷² The Upper Canada Liberals had not only lost morale in the dissensions and delay: they were left acutely embarrassed as well. And there was not much chance now that any outside support would rally to them in a vote on federation – not when they had so much difficulty in getting on with it themselves.

Brown’s health had suffered under the strain.⁷³ Apparently he had not recovered as fully from his ills of the previous year as it had appeared, and his heavy financial commitments at the Globe and Bothwell may also have been weighing on his mind. Fortunately parliament’s Easter recess intervened in early April, so that he could hope to recuperate before bringing in the resolutions at long last. When the House reassembled on April 11, however, the senior member for Toronto did not appear.⁷⁴ He did not return to parliament until the eighteenth, and then he had to request that the resolutions be postponed, as he was too unwell to speak to them.⁷⁵ His own condition caused only a brief further delay; but Sandfield Macdonald, Foley, and Connor sought still more postponements – while an amused and wholly confident government side urged that the famous Convention measures be introduced. There were violent moments, too, when an exasperated Brown and a defiant Foley attacked each other heatedly in debate, while Sandfield, forever armed against the world, swung fiercely and indiscriminately at both sides of the House.⁷⁶ Things could hardly have gone worse.

It was not until the night of April 30 that the ill-fated resolutions finally came before the assembly, and Brown, in introducing them, rose to make one of his giant speeches.⁷⁷ He spoke from eight till well past midnight, to a full house and crowded galleries. Yet somehow it was not an outstanding effort. He spread himself, as usual, on the ills of the union, but without really catching fire; and his treatment of the remedy, federation under joint authority, was almost perfunctory – general, short, and by way of a postscript. It was almost as if he himself had lost heart in the project after all the trials, frustrations, and disappointments of the past two months. He was doing his part, but as a duty; failure was foredoomed. There would be no strong vote, he could not help but see.

Indeed, the whole debate was an anticlimax, compared with the intense discussions that had raged within Upper Canada Reform. As it transpired, federation had come in under the worst auspices of delay and discord, and the government side had scarcely to take it seriously at all. The debate on the resolutions went on sporadically over several days, with few prominent speakers from ministerial ranks and a good many extraneous comments from back-benchers. For the opposition, McGee and McDougall spoke well in behalf of federation; Dorion and Mowat endorsed it; Sandfield Macdonald used the opportunity to preach the double majority again. For the government, Benjamin of North Hastings, past Grand Master of the Orange Order, really expressed the ministerial view when he condemned joint authority as government by commission and asked why a union of twenty years’ standing should be destroyed for “a miserable, juggling expression”.⁷⁸ The votes taken on May 7 settled the matter conclusively: 66 to 27 against ending the present union; 74 to 32 against federation under some joint authority.⁷⁹

When Brown looked more closely at the votes, he might still extract some small comfort. He had kept an Upper Canadian majority in both cases: the western vote on the two resolutions had gone in their favour 25 to 22, and 23 to 22. Ministerial boasts that Reform would lose its ascendancy in the West had not proved true, even though the division had finally been brought on by the government at a time when several Grits – who afterwards declared that they would have supported the resolutions – had been out of the House, not expecting a decision. Actually Brown had suffered very few defections. Only three Reformers, all from eastern Upper Canada, had ultimately voted against them, while Sandfield Macdonald had been markedly absent. Surprisingly enough, Foley and Connor had swallowed their anger and pride, and their speeches, to vote in favour of the measures, and so for Brown’s policies at the end.⁸⁰

Nevertheless, it was equally plain that the programme of constitutional change had attracted few votes beyond Brown’s own following, and precious few indeed from Lower Canada. Only nine from the eastern section had supported federation.⁸¹ The proposal had made no headway there – no doubt because the time that might have been spent by Upper Canada Liberals in spreading better understanding eastward had been taken up in their own internal squabbles. Yet western Reformers, in reaction, would fall back still more upon themselves.⁸² Why, they might argue, follow a policy that presumed on eastern support, as federation did? The West must return to its own wrongs, to its own demands, and make its own reforming forces so strong that none would dare deny them.

Obviously the federation principle had failed, even while the Globe tried to put the best face on it and announced that “the great question of constitutional change has passed its first parliamentary ordeal”.⁸³ How far was it Brown’s fault? He had hoped too much; he had acted too precipitately at the outset, in gambling on a quick introduction of the Convention’s resolutions while the enthusiasm roused by that meeting still seemed strong. It was an ineptly calculated risk and it displayed his leadership at its faultiest. Here his chief failings as a politician were all revealed: over-confidence, impatience, and imperiousness, and then sheer inability to woo and win – to persuade and conciliate instead of ordering and insisting. Brown, the strong, far-sighted director of the Convention of 1859, and Brown, the hasty, uncompromising dictator of the caucus of 1860, were two aspects of the same man.

Yet not everything was lost. The party still held together; even the malcontents were still in association. Nor could Brown be fairly blamed for their own sizeable contribution of distrust and envy, backsliding and postponement, their placing of obstacles without offering any really positive alternatives. Furthermore, the idea of federation in Reform circles was far from dead. It had been filed away, like British North American union among Conservatives, for future reference if it ever should seem feasible. And George Brown’s main share in stamping that idea on his party at the Convention, in the Address, and during the session of 1860, would be remembered long after his failure with the resolutions in that year had been forgotten. The Globe, summing up, wrote undismayed: “The joint authority will be established, and Upper Canada will become the centre, at no distant day, of a British Confederation extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Banks of Newfoundland.”⁸⁴

6

However important, the constitutional problem was not Brown’s only preoccupation in parliament that hectic spring. An old concern of his, the university question, had appeared once more. The provincial university, the secular and state-endowed University of Toronto, was under new attacks from religious denominations with colleges of their own to maintain, on the grounds that the university had lowered standards and wasted funds, and, worst of all, had not left a surplus from the public endowment that could be divided among the denominational colleges. A select committee of nine had been named by parliament to investigate.⁸⁵ George Brown was one of a varied membership that included Foley, Malcolm Cameron, and John A. Macdonald. Party lines did not necessarily hold on the question, however; for the committee hearings that began in March and ran through April often found Cameron and Macdonald ranged on one side, Brown and the Conservative William Cayley on the other. Certainly there was no doubt where Brown’s own sympathies would lie, as the champion of non-sectarian public education at all levels, and a firm believer in one strong central university. He was in close accord with the two chief witnesses for the University of Toronto at the hearings: John Langton, its Vice-Chancellor, and Daniel Wilson, Professor of History and English Literature in University College, the University’s actual teaching institution.

Brown, in fact, was particularly in accord with Wilson, an Edinburgh Scot like himself, who had once been his schoolmate at the Edinburgh High School.⁸⁶ Early in the year, when complaints against the university were being prepared for presentation to parliament, he and Wilson had conferred on the troubles ahead. The crux of the problem was that the existing University Act, that of 1853, had made a vague provision for the distribution of surplus income from the university endowment among “affiliated” colleges. There had been no surplus yet – and there was no clear indication that any funds at all had to go to the colleges by right. But when denominational interests, pinched by the depression, eyed Toronto’s fine new stone buildings in Queen’s Park, their sense of deprivation grew righteously acute. The powerful Wesleyan Methodist Conference that maintained Victoria College had been particularly aroused. It took the lead in memorializing against the unjust Toronto monopoly.

Recognizing the extent of the danger to the provincial institution, Brown himself, in discussion with Wilson, was even willing to consider providing new professorial chairs in the denominational colleges at public expense, in order to ease their need for funds and take the pressure off the central university. But Daniel Wilson argued that admitting the principle of public grants to sectarian institutions could only imperil the whole endowment: “Why not divide it among the claimants? – and so away goes the noblest provision ever made for an unsectarian provincial system of collegiate education.”⁸⁷

When, therefore, the university committee met, Brown, urged on by Wilson, stood four-square for the integrity of Toronto university, academic as well as financial.⁸⁸ But the attacking denominational forces had the province’s most potent educational personage on their side: the weighty Dr. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister and one-time principal of Victoria, Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada, and an old foe of George Brown’s. Having submitted a written statement to the committee, Ryerson gave his evidence with all the emotional oratory and polemical zeal that had made him so powerful a controversialist. He attacked Toronto’s disgraceful lowering of standards, which allowed an “unprecedented system of options” through the introduction of modern languages and natural science, and permitted half the time of its professors to be spent in tutoring honours students, instead of properly allotting their full attention to all the undergraduates for “critical exposition and drilling”.⁸⁹ He attacked the university’s lavish expenditures, particularly on buildings comparable in Toronto, he said, to St. Peter’s in Rome. And he freely painted the staff of University College as “a family compact” engaged in the Senate in voting salary increases for one another.⁹⁰ Altogether, his was a strong performance.

Thus, when George Brown cross-examined Superintendent Ryerson in mid-April, it was like a bout between well-matched heavy-weights. Details of the record, questions of motive, personalities, flew fast. By an intensive use of university records Brown pressed Ryerson well back on a number of his sweeping charges, though the latter repeatedly evaded telling blows by failing to remember the episode in question.⁹¹ Thereafter, too, the doctor submitted fresh statements with new interpretations to meet Brown’s countercharges. At the end both sides claimed victory. The Globe deemed Ryerson “thoroughly roasted”, while Ryerson attributed his triumph to divine aid.⁹² The truth was that neither hardened battler had really been hurt.

In fact, after all the sound and fury, the whole investigation ended without a decision. There were two draft reports for and against the university given to the press, but neither of them was adopted by the committee or presented to parliament – which rose in any case on May 19.⁹³ The committee was too divided to decide, and so was the ministry itself. If John A. Macdonald favoured Ryerson and the denominational colleges, there were those in his own party, like Cayley, who did not. Undoubtedly the ministerialists did not feel so secure in office that they could afford to press so controversial an issue. Indeed, the fizzling-out of the university question was one more consequence of the weakness and division in government under the existing Canadian union.

Both the university interests and those of the colleges were, of course, left unsatisfied. In early May, Wilson entreated Brown without success to push the committee to a decision, in order to erase Ryerson’s “most unscrupulous misrepresentations and falsehoods” and remove the stain that he had placed on the character of the whole Toronto staff – “arraigned before a Committee of your House as so many knaves”.⁹⁴ On the other hand, the colleges were left with no answers to their complaints and still without funds forthcoming. Yet for Brown, at least, the contest was not without significance. He had helped keep the central University of Toronto intact; he had fought one more round with Egerton Ryerson; and he had left a powerful Methodist element with rankling memories of his opposition to the interests of Victoria College.

The pace seemed quieter once Brown was back in Toronto with the Globe. Soon, however, the summer calm was broken by a stiff exchange of letters between John Sandfield Macdonald and himself, letters fully published in the Globe in June and July.⁹⁵ The argument was an old one, concerning what the former Brown-Dorion government had meant to do to provide compensation for the abolition of seigneurial rights in Lower Canada. As an ex-member of that short-lived cabinet, Sandfield had recently made known that it would have paid compensation from the general provincial funds – as the Liberal-Conservative ministry had done – whereas Brown, with Dorion’s concurrence, had always held that only Lower Canadian resources had been earmarked for that purpose. Sandfield’s assertion could not be treated as a chance remark. It was too well calculated both to win him “moderate” friends in Lower Canada and to embarrass George Brown among the western Grits. The party leader naturally pressed for a retraction. He was refused. A dispute developed in a series of bristling open letters arguing over what had been intended by the Brown-Dorion ministers, and who had said what. In effect, the bare façade of common party allegiance was only maintained by the two writers’ avoiding words quite so explicit as “liar” and “cheat”.

It would seem, however, that the leader had the better of it. While Sandfield cited memories of what had been agreed on at private party conclaves, Brown rested his case on verifiable facts as to what the people concerned had stated in parliament, and how they had cast votes there. Here, indeed, he neatly caught Sandfield out. When the pride of Cornwall categorically denied that he had ever voted with Brown for the principle that compensation should come from Lower Canadian funds alone, the latter supplied the relevant and incriminating page reference from the Journals of the House. The vote in question had been inadvertently omitted from the Journals’ index for 1859 – and Brown’s effective deduction was that Sandfield, doing his research too hastily, had concluded from not finding an entry in the index that it was safe to deny the vote!⁹⁶

In any case, if this was a victory, and a necessary victory for Brown, it was a small unedifying one that only revealed how wide the breaches in Liberalism were. Nor had he enjoyed the contest. During the course of the exchange with Sandfield, he wrote gloomily to his confidant, Luther Holton, “I have hesitated about answering, simply because if I do I must show him up as the most unprincipled scoundrel that ever got into the position he occupies – and I have had so much disagreeable personal work to do that I shrank from assailing so old an acquaintance in such a fashion.”⁹⁷

Only a few weeks later the troubled Brown was swept into still another dispute – a much more personal one this time, involving his own financial affairs. At the end of July, the ministerial press suddenly pounced on the $20,000 credit he had obtained from Edmunstone, Allan and Company the previous winter to finance his lumber operations at Both well. They luridly presented it as a $20,000 bribe from the Montreal Steamship Company to purchase his support for a shipping subsidy bill in parliament.⁹⁸ The basis for so startling a charge was the fact that Edmunstone and Allan, merchants, shipbuilders, and brokers, were also the chief interest behind the shipping company more familiarly known as “the Allan line”; and, that spring, parliament had put through a bill to increase the line’s transatlantic subsidy. Brown’s own negotiations with the firm could hardly have been kept secret, what with the various agents and brokers concerned, and his need to arrange a mortgage on Bothwell as security for the funds advanced. But now it seemed that the time had come to uncover and use “that twenty thousand dollars” against the paragon of Reform virtue. The government papers went eagerly to work.

Brown’s continuing troubles with the moderates in his party were plain enough. Any doubts raised as to his political morality could only embarrass the Reform leader further, and especially might rouse those left-wing Clear Grits who had almost a conditioned, mouth-watering reflex to the bare mention of the word “corruption”. As if by set design, through early August, journals from Quebec and Montreal to Hamilton and London raised such an entanglement of inferences based on presumptions against Brown, that their original guesses began to look like fact; and the Globe and its master were furiously battling what another age would call a smear campaign.

In vain did the Globe and its allies point out that Allan and Company had provided the $20,000 credit in a regular business transaction months before the subsidy bill had been drafted by the government. They were the same concern that wanted the bill, came the reply: hence Brown was guilty, by association. In vain did the Globe recall the patent fact that Brown had actually spoken and voted against the measure. His votes and speeches, retorted the Toronto Leader, had been “so severely innocent, so cruelly harmless” that they had obviously been pre-arranged.⁹⁹ Seemingly, he had not tried hard enough to hinder the bill’s passage by the government majority. Thus he again was guilty – by imputation.

And when the Globe reiterated that the money had been an ordinary commercial credit for the export of goods, backed by “ample securities”, the Quebec Morning Chronicle affected to believe that the only goods paid for had been George Brown’s brains; while the London Prototype bluntly doubted that he could have had ample securities to offer – “if current reports as to the financial standing of the hon. member are to be relied on”.¹⁰⁰ Now, indeed, the campaign broadened to attack Brown’s whole business reputation. The Leader was especially extreme. And who was its editor now? Why, George Sheppard, who had moved there when the backers of his Hamilton Times had failed. “In Bothwell,” said the Leader vengefully, “schoolboys make kite-tails of Brown’s ‘ample securities’,” while in Toronto, “Mr. Brown’s business character and standing are matters of common gossip… we know of no man so reckless and few so unprincipled in his business transactions.”¹⁰¹ Sheppard threw in new charges for good measure: that the Globe owner had filled his pockets as Minister of Finance in 1858 (surely a record for two days in office), that three banks had recently paid him sums ranging from $8,000 to $20,000 for “patriotic services” – and, at the same time, that no bank would give him facilities for his debts.¹⁰² The Leader even demanded a parliamentary inquiry!

Altogether, it was a shot-gun blast of defamation, which seemed likely to injure if it did not kill. Of course, there was not much new in this procedure to the rowdy provincial press of either side. But the point that grew increasingly apparent here was how little fact Brown’s defamers had to go on in making their vague charges, whereas the Globe’s own accusations had normally been much better grounded and thus much more devastating in their total effect. In this instance, within three weeks Brown was able to collect and publish documents and letters clearly demonstrating that the $20,000 was truly a commercial credit for lumber that was really being cut, and that there was no cause for believing that he had received special favours from Allan and Company or done any in return.¹⁰³ The ministerial press turned off to other issues, naturally claiming to be unconvinced, while Sheppard (now “disgusted with my Canadian experiences”) left the Leader and the country for the United States.¹⁰⁴

Unquestionably, however, some harm had been done George Brown, although it was more personal than political. His finances could hardly be in an easy condition now. He had already put a decided strain on them by his improvements at the Globe and his large indebtedness at Bothwell. And the systematic press abuse had not enhanced his credit standing: inevitably some doubts would cling. Concerned about his personal reputation – which always mattered fiercely to him – and concerned over his business affairs, the Reform leader was still in no position to improve his party cause.

7

Perhaps it had been a concerted plan to disable him politically by distracting him with business troubles. At any rate, Brown grimly agreed afterwards with a sympathetic Holton that it had been “a regularly got-up attack”. Apologizing as usual for being slow to write, he added soberly, “I am indeed incorrigible in the matter of correspondence – and the knowledge of that fact makes another argument in favour of my getting out of public life – which I very much long to do.”¹⁰⁵

Yet a different and pleasantly exciting distraction soon appeared. Edward, Prince of Wales, the twenty-year-old heir to the throne of empire, was now en route to Canada for the eagerly anticipated royal visit. When he landed at Quebec on August 18, in stifling heat, Brown went there to greet him with the other members of the loyal and perspiring legislature.¹⁰⁶ As Canada’s first royal tour moved grandly forward, all eyes were fastened on its heavy daily schedule of public welcomes and processions, official receptions and farewells: partly because reverence for the Crown and belief in the British connection were real indeed; partly because Canada itself was on display, a Canada enjoying its first great chance for self-appreciation. But the sharp strains and conflicts within the province could only be momentarily obscured by the radiance of this princely visit, as briefly dazzling as the late summer sun. Suddenly, at Kingston early in September, they broke through.

Kingston was an Orange Conservative stronghold: the very citadel of Upper Canada Conservatism. The Orangemen of Kingston had erected a splendid arch, suitably adorned with Orange emblems, to welcome the Prince with all the loyalty due from British subjects, but specially claimed by the Orange Order as its own particular prerogative. Yet while this loyal and Protestant order was lawful in Canada, in Great Britain it was still an illegal body, a secret society linked with age-old Irish troubles. And the Duke of Newcastle, now Colonial Secretary, who was travelling with the young Prince as his official guardian, was determined that Her Majesty’s government should not be embarrassed by Her Majesty’s heir’s recognizing this disreputable and proscribed organization in any way.¹⁰⁷

The Orangemen of Kingston were no less determined to display their loyalty and themselves; and to their loyalism was added a righteously indignant Protestantism, mindful that in French Lower Canada the Prince had received the leaders of Roman Catholic bodies readily enough. Again the rallying cries of race and religion were sounded, as Kingston stood defiantly to its Orange arch and banners. On September 5, therefore, the royal steamer moved on past the town, bearing Prince and Duke away uncompromised, but leaving the Orangemen to an angry anticlimax, Kingston merchants and mamas to deepest disappointment, and John A. Macdonald and his Conservative colleagues in Upper Canada to no little embarrassment of their own.

As party leaders they were committed to the Orange Order, which provided them with so much organized and lusty election support. But as provincial ministers they were inevitably involved in the official repudiation of Orangeism, whether it was a matter of high imperial policy or not. Nor did the Orange issue stop at Kingston, for, as the tour went on across the West (still amid most loyal enthusiasm), Orangemen several times sought to entice the Prince under their arches, and the Duke repeatedly had to take hurried evasive action to save his bewildered charge.

The game was played in Toronto, for example. As the royal party drove to St. James’ Cathedral on Sunday morning, they had suddenly to swerve from an arch where a portrait of William of Orange, patron saint of the Order, had unaccountably appeared.¹⁰⁸ Newcastle had angry words for Mayor Wilson afterwards; but otherwise the Toronto visit went ecstatically, for no one blamed the young Prince for his mentor’s policy.¹⁰⁹ George Brown himself was proudly with the official group at the grand Yacht Club regatta on September 11.¹¹⁰ Moreover, the decorations at the Globe office were quite outstanding in a city that outdid itself in welcoming display. There were flags and patriotic mottoes all across the Globe’s façade, an arc of illuminated globes along the top, and, within it, Prince of Wales plumes done in coloured gaslights, to shine out resplendently in red, white, and blue.¹¹¹

Meanwhile, however, the clamour of Conservatives against their own ministerial leaders continued to rise: a most enjoyable and heartening spectacle for Brown. The Globe exploited it to the full, condemning Orangemen for their traditional rowdyism while conceding their legal position in Canada; censuring the Colonial Secretary’s high-handedness, but largely forgiving it on grounds of ignorance; and reserving the chief blame for Macdonald and Co. who, as the responsible ministers in the province, should have foreseen the inevitable situation in Upper Canada and given full and proper advice to the Crown.¹¹²

Yet even in these circumstances Brown did not change his fundamental stand on the Orange Order. He had always held it a disorderly, disruptive force that made for sectarian violence, not religious liberty, and did the cause of Protestantism far more harm than good.¹¹³ He had said so even during the height of his campaign against Roman Catholic power in the early fifties. Now, however, it was still possible to repudiate Orange excesses in the Globe as “utterly indefensible”, and yet point out why the troubles had occurred, and, above all, to inveigh against the government’s failure to prevent them – through incompetence, spinelessness, and total disregard for the interests of Upper Canada. It was an old trumpet call; but the enemy had suffered a severe blow. They were faltering badly, in fact, and Brown knew it.¹¹⁴

This was the auspicious moment to take to the public platform again. Before the Prince had left the province, within a few days of his Toronto visit, the Liberal leader was off to Galt to address a major Reform demonstration there. There were flags, bands, and a gala parade on that sparkling early autumn day, for this was a major party occasion.¹¹⁵ Brown rose to it with his best soul-stirring oratory, denouncing all the evils of misgovernment and the failings of the union, and calling once again for the Convention remedy of federation. But as he held forth, someone in the audience broke in to question his alliance with D’Arcy McGee, the Lower Canadian Roman Catholic Irish leader – a query doubtlessly inspired by the wave of Protestant anger sweeping Upper Canada at the contrast in the official treatment accorded Roman Catholic organizations in the East and the Orange Order in the West. Brown’s reply was prompt and plain. He paid warm tribute to McGee’s abilities, emphatically declaring, “I would rather a thousand times act with Mr. McGee than the dough-faced Protestants that misrepresent Upper Canada! ”¹¹⁶ Clearly the Orange furore was not going to lead him to any out-and-out campaign for “Protestant union”.

McGee responded gratefully when he heard of the Galt speech: “I have to thank you for the exceedingly kind mention you there made of myself. Its boldness was worthy of you, and its kindness far more than I invited.”¹¹⁷ For his own part, Brown told Luther Holton: “The Galt affair … has done much good already. I owe that fellow who cried ‘What about McGee?’ something handsome. It was the very chance I have been seeking for a long while. I hope I have done McGee justice – I intended to do it as handsomely as possible, for indeed he is a noble fellow and deserves a generous return.”¹¹⁸ He admitted that his own inclination was to “pitch right into the mêlée on the Protestant side – but some of our friends are weak brethren, and I do not wish, if it can be avoided, to weaken McGee’s position.”¹¹⁹ In short, for the sake of the party, he still hoped to keep ties with eastern Liberalism through his likeable Roman Catholic ally. He rather expected that the western Conservatives would themselves try to “get up a great Protestant cry”, but did not fear it; nor “the Orange game of John A.”, who was working manfully by this time to redeem himself with his outraged Orange supporters.¹²⁰

Truly, the tide seemed to have swung back to Reform that autumn. Orangemen massing at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto, early in October, proved they were not yet mollified. They flatly denounced the Liberal-Conservative government, while the Globe beamed.¹²¹ Moreover, in the elections under way that month for a portion of the Legislative Council seats, Reformers made increasing headway in Upper Canada. Malcolm Cameron, for one, gained a Council place, while the Lambton seat he thus vacated in the Assembly was taken shortly afterwards by an old Sarnia friend of Brown’s, Hope Mackenzie, Alexander’s brother. Meanwhile, the harvest was good; business looked more encouraging, and Brown went down to Both well for several busy weeks.

But now the Conservative ministers launched a counter-offensive. Led by John A. Macdonald, they opened an extensive speaking tour across the West. It was a sign of the Conservatives’ alarm that they thus took to stumping the country, a practice they had previously regarded as rather low and Liberal, if not downright radical and republican. Brown’s answer was a counter-offensive of his own. If the ministers were going to invade the West beyond Toronto, his prime domain, he would foray eastward into the more Tory half of Upper Canada. On through November the opposing stump campaigns went noisily forward: Brown in Napanee and Kingston, Macdonald in Brantford, London, and other western points. Of course, they also switched back and forth to repair damage. Brown dashed up to London, for example, and Macdonald down to Kingston in his turn.

The Liberal leader’s own best effort came in Kingston on the night of November 22, speaking deep in enemy country, and to an audience in Kingston’s massive limestone City Hall that was notably full of Orangemen. He took a lighter vein, but talked up boldly, as he compared himself to a Presbyterian minister preaching in the Vatican (“by invitation of its inmates”), and brightly observed, “In the West we look upon Kingston as the Ultima Thule of political hopelessness!”¹²² He did not expect them to vote out Macdonald, he said frankly: Kingstonians were only aroused now because “your own toes have been trodden on”. Yet this should simply bring home to them how much the government had ignored the basic interests and feelings of Upper Canada. And while Orangemen had not been on the side of civil and religious liberty thus far, they now might recognize how these had suffered under a Conservative ministry subservient to Lower Canadian masters for the past six years. He won a vote of approval at the end, probably given more for his manner than his message. But that in itself was satisfying.

By December, however, George Brown was running down, tired not only by the exertions of his campaign, but by the weight of business problems besides. “I have twenty times more on my hands than one man ought to have,” he told Alexander Mackenzie, “and some six or eight Tory counties have invited me to speak.”¹²³ Again it appeared that he had not really regained all his old stamina after his period of exhaustion in 1859; and 1860 had proved trying enough itself. Still, the Conservatives had by this time closed their campaign, so that he could also call a halt. But here business affairs intervened once more, to keep him from a rest. He had to go down to New York for the Globe in the second week in December, and was detained there for the rest of the month, only arriving back in Toronto in early January of 1861.¹²⁴

One unfortunate consequence was that he was too late to attend a particularly large Liberal rally in Norfolk County, graced by the chief men of the party and designed to counter whatever effect the Cartier-Macdonald ministers might have had in the West. Michael Foley, who had arranged the Norfolk gathering, sent him a tart note of complaint. Brown returned a stiff and far from apologetic reply.¹²⁵ Their relations had evidently not improved much since their open clash at the last parliamentary session.

The party leader had other invitations to address public meetings throughout the opening weeks of 1861, far more than he could hope to accept.¹²⁶ Reform constituencies were holding gatherings of their own across Upper Canada, trying to sustain the tide that had been running against the ministry in the months before. Yet now, it seemed, that tide was ebbing, without any significant achievement, for now the angers roused in Upper Canada during the royal visit had lost their force, and the Conservative leaders had largely managed to quiet their following again. It was not likely that Reform had lost its superior strength in the West; but in the absence of either a parliamentary session or a general election (which the government would scarcely have wanted to call) the Liberals had not been able to utilize their moment of advantage to make significant new gains. A general election would have to come later in 1861, since parliament’s term would expire with the next session. But in January of that year no one yet could say which side would prove to have gained or lost the more on balance during the twelve months preceding.

And yet, on balance, George Brown had personally lost ground. He was quite well enough aware of it to wonder again whether this was not the time to retire from politics. Once, near the turn of the year, he sat down to draft a letter announcing his withdrawal, and addressed it to his colleague Oliver Mowat. “My dear Mowat,” he began, “I need not remind you of my determination to retire from parliamentary life at the earliest possible moment, and that for the last three years nothing has prevented my doing so except the fear that new combinations might result from my retirement highly injurious to the cause we have so much at heart. I think, however, that the moment has come when I may retire, not only without fear of that danger, but with the probability that my doing so may largely conduce to secure the great ends we have been fighting for. You must have observed that throughout their whole tour in Upper Canada the one end and aim of the members of the administration has been to excite personal hostility to myself and revive the feelings inspired by the fierce party contests of past years….”¹²⁷ But he left the draft unfinished, his mind still not made up.

As an alternative, a tired, uncertain, and discouraged Brown asked Luther Holton what he would say to his own running off to Europe to be absent for the coming session – a purely temporary withdrawal. His friend quite understood: “The temptation to allow those who are ceaselessly denouncing you as the great obstacle to the success of the party to try their hands is I admit very strong, but they are a mere handful.” A leader could simply not leave his followers “like sheep without a shepherd”. Unless, said Holton more sharply, “you were to assume your definite retirement from public life, which of course you do not and must not think of”.¹²⁸

And there it was. Nevertheless, as 1861 began, Brown still had the defeat of his essential policy, the Toronto Convention scheme, hanging over him, the dissensions in his party to reckon with, and the shortcomings in his own course of leadership to face. He still might experience grave financial difficulties if business did not definitely recover, since his own resources were so obviously stretched thin. Finally, his health was again unsettled; he was worn and worried. The Liberal leader was in serious trouble, and trouble could yet become disaster.