John A. Macdonald. Ged Martin
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was born “in one of a row of stone tenement houses,” part of a residential area south of the river — “tenement” was a Scots term for an apartment block. His parents were from the Scottish Highlands. Hugh Macdonald was a short man; Helen Shaw was both physically larger and four years older — an age gap that their son replicated in his first marriage. The couple had five children, the last born when Helen was forty. Margaret came first: “my oldest and sincerest friend,” Macdonald called her sixty years later. There were two younger siblings, James and Louisa; another boy had died in infancy. Their mother possessed a driving willpower and a lively sense of humour, both of which she greatly needed. To her son John, she transmitted a determination to succeed in life — as well as his celebrated prominent nose. Helen spoke Gaelic, but Scotland’s ancient language was associated with backwardness, and she did not to pass it on to her son.
Two contrasting stories survive from John A. Macdonald’s early days. One shows him playing to an audience. To impress other children, the four year-old placed a chair on a table, climbed up, and delivered a speech, accompanied by vehement gestures. Unluckily, he overbalanced, fell, and gashed his chin. Macdonald’s first recorded oration left him with a lifelong scar, which photo-graphers generally painted out. He was probably imitating a fiery sermon from a Presbyterian preacher. Perhaps his parents considered a Church career for him, until a schoolmaster in Canada commented that the argumentative boy would make a better lawyer than minister. The second tale reveals an introspective side of young John’s character. Taken for a walk through the busy streets, he became lost in the crowds, but was too young to explain where he lived. Eventually his father rescued him, and punished him. Such were the harsh standards of the time — and this is one of the few glimpses of Hugh in the story.
Glasgow was a boom town, heading for a bust, and Hugh Macdonald was one of the early casualties. When his small-scale textile-manufacturing enterprise failed, relatives blamed “the knavery of a partner,” but he was no businessman, and there are hints that he drank too much: John A. Macdonald’s alcohol problem was probably inherited. Financially ruined, the Macdonalds were forced to seek a new life overseas. In Helen’s complex family network, two relatives might offer support. Her brother, James Shaw, had emigrated to Georgia, while a half-sister, Anna, had married a British Army officer, Donald Macpherson, and settled at Kingston in Upper Canada. Unfortunately, the Macdonalds were not the only members of the extended family in crisis. The children of another half sister, Margaret Clark, were orphaned in 1819.
The five Clark girls were bred for genteel life, and were more likely to find suitable husbands among Southern planters than in the pioneer world of Canada. The eldest of them, Margaret, twenty-two in 1820, led three of her sisters to Georgia. One of them, Isabella, then aged eleven, later became Macdonald’s first wife. However, in childhood, she could hardly have known her five-year-old cousin well.
Another Clark daughter, Maria, fifteen in 1820, joined the Macdonalds to help rear their children, and travelled with the family to Canada. Although ten years his senior, Maria outlived Canada’s first prime minister and became the source of memories of his childhood.
Emigration was often a lottery. If the Clarks had not been orphaned, the Macdonalds might have joined Helen’s brother in Georgia (after all, Hugh knew the cotton trade). Instead of becoming a Father of Canadian Confederation, John A. might have served the Southern Confederacy, fighting to defend slavery in the American Civil War. Instead, the family headed for the Macphersons’ in Kingston. Donald Macpherson had joined the British Army back in 1775, and risen to the rank of colonel, commanding the Kingston garrison when the Americans attacked in 1812. Now retired and a respected citizen, he had recently built a suburban mansion. The Macdonalds moved into his former downtown residence.
It is hard to assess the importance of John A. Macdonald’s early childhood in Scotland. He visited relatives there on his first return trip to Britain in 1842, but rarely if ever travelled north from London on subsequent transatlantic jaunts. He was a Canadian Scot, reared among exiles. Most of his early friends were Scottish — but, later, so too were some bitter enemies. He picked up a local accent, even ending sentences with the characteristic Canadian “eh?” He once jovially remarked that although he had “the misfortune … to be a Scotchman …. I was caught young, and was brought to this country before I had been very much corrupted.” With his locker-room sense of humour, he sometimes joked about kilts. No true Scotsman would be so disrespectful.
The Macdonalds endured a squalid six-week voyage to Quebec. Packed with several hundred passengers, the Earl of Buckinghamshire was about the size of a modern Toronto Island ferry, or Vancouver’s SeaBus. Its washroom facilities were two privies, each less than fifty centimetres square, handily located over the stern. Crammed into a sleeping compartment, 1.5 metres square and stacked with bunks, were the parents, four children, cousin Maria, and Macdonald’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother, whom Helen refused to leave behind. (She barely survived the journey.) Even this cramped space was shared with another emigrant family. By the time they reached Kingston, in mid-July 1820, they had been travelling for three months.
With hindsight, emigration to Canada was John A. Macdonald’s first step towards a notable destiny. At the time, it seemed a humiliation. His parents became determined that their son must succeed to compensate for their failure. Helen in particular insisted that “John will make more than an ordinary man.” A family tragedy added to the pressures. In 1822, Macdonald’s younger brother, James, was killed in an accident — “if accident it can be called,” commented an early biographer, catching Macdonald’s anger at the tragedy even sixty years later. One evening, the parents entrusted their sons to an ex-soldier called Kennedy. Preferring boozing to babysitting, Kennedy took the children to a bar and attempted to make them drink gin. When the boys tried to run away, Kennedy lost his temper and hurled James into the iron grate of a fireplace, causing internal injuries that killed him. This appalling experience left John A. Macdonald as the sole surviving son, bearing the full weight of his parents’ hopes upon his young shoulders.
Kingston was then the largest urban centre in Upper Canada, but it contained only three thousand people, smaller than most modern country towns. New York State was just across the St. Lawrence, but the United States seemed remote — although the Macphersons vividly recalled Yankee bullets smashing into Kingston’s timber fortifications back in 1812. The British Empire, on the other hand, was a very real presence, thanks to the redcoats of the imperial garrison: the young John A. Macdonald even dreamed of a career under the British flag in India. The town had been founded in 1784 by Loyalist refugees from the newly independent American republic, families like the Hagermans and Cartwrights who had made sacrifices for Britain — and coolly expected rewards in return. Kingston’s elite accepted successful newcomers, especially Scots or Irish Protestants, men like merchant John Mowat, from Caithness, who settled in 1816; lawyer Thomas Kirkpatrick from Dublin, who arrived in 1823; and — a decade later — the medical doctor James Campbell, who came from Yorkshire via Montreal. The son of a failed immigrant, John A. Macdonald had to gatecrash this local elite. For all his fabled political charm, his sometimes fraught relations with Kingston’s leading families reflected his marginal status.
After failing to establish a store in Kingston, Hugh Macdonald shifted forty kilometres west to the village of Hay Bay in 1824. Later, he moved to the Stone Mills (now Glenora) in Prince Edward County, to run the flour mill that gave the place its name. Although Hugh had no farming experience, he considered moving still further west, to try growing wheat. A neighbour tactfully steered him away from the project: nothing would grow beyond Port Hope because “the summer frosts kill everything.” Decades later, Macdonald quoted that story against pessimists who doubted the potential of the prairies. In 1836, the Macphersons arranged a job for Hugh as a clerk in the Commercial Bank, Kingston’s own financial institution, and the Macdonalds moved back to town. By then, his son had replaced him as the family breadwinner. Hugh, it was discreetly recalled, was “unequal to the responsibilities of the head of a family.” John A. recalled that it had been his indomitable mother who carried them through the difficult early years in Canada.
John A. Macdonald was a bright child, “the star of Canada,” as one of Hugh’s drinking pals called him. Aged ten in 1825, he was sent to the Midland District Grammar School in Kingston, an academy that specialized in teaching Latin and mathematics, subjects which were