The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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to last.” His supporters failed to realize that heading a coalition of hungry supporters probably reduced his scope to direct resources to Kingston: one local newspaper wrote that as “Prime Minister,” Macdonald’s “power to do the city further good is almost illimitable.” On December 17, 1857, he was re-elected by a massive 1,189 votes to nine, but his triumph was a high tide, not a benchmark, and disillusionment soon followed.
The Kingston victory was also an exception. Across Upper Canada, especially west of Toronto, government candidates were swept away by Grit demands for rep. by pop. and denunciations of Catholic schools. Bizarrely, two of Macdonald’s colleagues, both prominent Orangemen, were defeated after being denounced as tools of the Pope. Nor did he lead a united team. “We are losing every where from our friends splitting the party,” he complained. But there was no “party.” His ministry was a coalition, formed after the previous elections. In Cabinet, Macdonald worked well with Reformers, but they had not created an integrated grassroots organization and so, in the localities, rival candidates came forward. Every split “discourages our friends and strengthens our foes.” Macdonald issued appeals for unity, hinting at future rewards for those who withdrew. He tried to coordinate the campaign from Toronto. “I cannot leave the helm here for a moment,” he wrote, “or everything will go to the devil.” Shaw’s intervention forced him to spend a few days canvassing in Kingston, but he quickly returned to his headquarters. But on December 23, bad news made him hurry home again.
His mother had suffered a series of strokes in recent years, but this time Helen was likely felled by a virus, perhaps midwinter influenza: young Hugh John was also “seriously ill.” Both recovered but, on December 28, Macdonald’s wife Isabella died. She was forty-eight, and they had been married for fourteen years. Her life had often seemed precarious but her death was still unexpected. For a politician leading an election campaign, the bereavement was devastating. Political controversy was forgotten, wrote a Kingston journalist as he pictured Macdonald “sorrowing at his desolate fireside.” (In fact, he was at his mother’s house. His Brock Street residence had burned in 1856, and he never owned a Kingston home again.) A three-kilometre procession followed Isabella’s coffin on December 30, the largest funeral in the city’s history. But politics could not be forgotten, nor was sympathy universal. The Globe did not report Macdonald’s bereavement, even unleashing a virulent attack on him on the morning of Isabella’s burial. By January 3, 1858, Macdonald was back in Toronto, and his secretary thought him “pretty well under the circumstances.” He had a government to run, and elections still to fight.
Although the Upper Canada results were bad, Macdonald’s Lower Canada allies, the Bleus, swept to victory: the ministry would have a massive thirty-six seat overall majority in the Assembly. The shattered premier talked of resigning, but Sir Edmund Head persuaded him to continue. With three of his Cabinet colleagues defeated, his first task was to rebuild the Upper Canada section of the ministry, but how? “What to do I do not know,” he wrote despairingly on January 16.
One possible avenue was to seek an alliance with George Brown’s rival for the leadership of the Upper Canada Reformers, his near namesake, John Sandfield Macdonald. An attractive if sometimes abrasive character, “Sandfield” was bilingual, and a Catholic, although not especially devout (he once sued a priest for defamation after being likened to a mushroom on a dunghill). He opposed rep. by pop., which would weaken his political base in eastern Upper Canada by shifting power to the burgeoning districts further west. From Toronto, George Brown could defy the French, but Glengarry County and the tiny river port of Cornwall preferred a united Canada. “From Montreal we obtain our money,” Sandfield explained. His fantasy solution to sectional confrontation was the “double majority”: ministries must have strong support in both halves of the province. At intervals over the next decade, Macdonald would try to exploit the John A.–Sandfield–Brown triangle, seeking to use first one Reform leader and then the other, to checkmate his rival. But his first attempt failed. On January 26, Macdonald offered Sandfield two Cabinet seats, urging him to choose “a Reformer supporting the Government, and not a Grit.” A coded telegram, “All right,” would signify agreement, but the reply was “No go.” John A. Macdonald filled the vacant Cabinet posts from his own depleted ranks.
The 1858 parliamentary session was one of the longest and nastiest in Canadian history. Although the government’s program contained little of importance, the Grits fought every inch of the way. By mid-March, John A. Macdonald was “hardly able to crawl” and privately he talked of finding a pretext to resign. “I find the work & annoyance too much for me.” He needed space to grieve for Isabella, and perhaps he blamed himself for having left her in Kingston. He was drinking more than his exhausted system could handle. One evening in May, he delivered an alarmingly incoherent speech in Assembly. Soon after, it was announced that he had joined a temperance group, Macdonald himself admitting that “he had not been altogether free from blame in the course he pursued.” The Globe called it “the funniest thing that has occurred for a long time.” Canada’s premier was becoming a figure of mockery.
One high-risk manoeuvre offered John A. Macdonald the chance to confound his tormenters. If his government could find an excuse to offer its resignation, his quarrelsome critics might find it difficult to unite, and impossible to secure an Assembly majority. Never having officially quit, Macdonald’s colleagues could then bounce back stronger than before. It was an attractive tactic, for nobody believed that George Brown would find Lower Canada allies willing to make him premier: even Brown called himself a “government impossibility.” Unfortunately for this dodge, Macdonald’s solid French Canadian support gave him a bombproof majority. Only if he were defeated could there be a pretext to lure George Brown into the trap.
However, one issue threatened disunity among Macdonald’s supporters. In January 1858, news arrived that Queen Victoria had chosen Ottawa as Canada’s permanent capital. There was widespread protest against the selection of this primitive backwoods town: the Globe predicted that any public buildings erected in Ottawa would soon “be abandoned to the moles and the bats.” Indeed, Premier Macdonald was in no hurry to start construction. “Do not say anything about any action of the Government on the matter,” he warned the editor to whom he leaked the scoop. His Lower Canada supporters especially disliked the Queen’s choice and, on July 28, a Bleu revolt carried a motion denouncing Ottawa by sixty-four votes to fifty. It was a parliamentary hiccup, but the next day, Macdonald tendered his Cabinet’s resignation, in protest against the Assembly’s “uncourteous insult” to the Queen. Since ministers had not snubbed their monarch, they had no reason to resign. Indeed, they had comfortably defeated a formal censure motion and so had no right to quit. The ensuing week of farcical intrigue damaged the reputation of public life, and branded John A. Macdonald as an inept trickster.
Still caretaker premier, Macdonald sat back to enjoy watching George Brown self-destruct in an impossible pursuit of power — in Macdonald’s contemptuous image, like a greedy fish gobbling at the angler’s bait. Unfortunately, Brown grabbed the bait and eluded the hook. Since Cabinets were small, there were only six Lower Canadian posts to fill, and the task proved unexpectedly easy. Antoine-Aimé Dorion was keen to show that his Rouges could tame the Toronto Protestant ogre, while Montreal’s business community wanted its voice heard too. The Brown-Dorion ministry was sworn into office on August 2, and John A. Macdonald automatically became Canada’s ex-premier. Worse still, the incoming team even offered some plausible policies. Disagreements over Catholic schools were mysteriously sidelined, but there was an important breakthrough on representation by population. Montreal Reformer Luther H. Holton encouraged Brown to consider restructuring the province as a two-headed (Ontario-Quebec) federation. Each section would run its own affairs, with Upper Canada having its rep. by pop. majority in the joint legislature. It looked a cumbersome constitution for just two million people: intriguingly, Brown wondered whether a union of all the provinces would make more sense. But the idea offered Lower Canadian politicians a device to protect their local interests while giving ground to Upper Canada’s growing weight of numbers. The new ministry could also plead for time to work out the details. John A. Macdonald urgently needed to strangle the Brown-Dorion ministry in its cradle.
Macdonald was helped by the constitutional rule requiring ministerial by-elections. By accepting office, Brown’s Cabinet colleagues ceased to be members of the Assembly until their ridings