The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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of Newcastle, the British Cabinet minister responsible for the colonies. Kingston was their first Upper Canadian port of call, and Macdonald planned a glittering ball at which his constituents could meet the prince. He was not alone in planning a welcome. Catholic priests had been prominent in civic ceremonies in French Canada, and Kingston’s Orangemen determined to parade in their regalia under triumphal arches to demonstrate that Canada was a Protestant country too. Unfortunately, the Orange Order was banned in Ireland and the duke refused to countenance its existence. When the royal steamboat arrived at Kingston, a furious row broke out, with Macdonald insisting that the Order was a legal body in Canada, Newcastle refusing to allow the prince to land, and the Orangemen standing their ground on the waterfront. The gala ball was a flop, despite Macdonald’s bogus claim that “His Royal Highness had expressed his sincere regret at the unfortunate misunderstanding.” After a twenty-four-hour standoff, the prince sailed away. Macdonald had furiously told the duke that “if they passed Kingston by, they should also pass him by.” For the next two weeks, the senior minister from Upper Canada boycotted the royal tour. The politician who had resigned because Parliament had insulted Queen Victoria over Ottawa had placed himself in the invidious position of snubbing her son and heir. Eventually, Macdonald swallowed his pride and rejoined the official party. Not surprisingly, there were suspicions he had been on drunken bender.
Macdonald’s political standing was so shaken that he embarked on a speaking tour of the province, to rebuild his grassroots support. “I never took to the stump before,” he commented, but he enjoyed the experience. Unfortunately, extremist Orangemen believed Macdonald had not done enough to defend them, and at the next elections, in the summer of 1861, his Protestant power base in Kingston was fractured. His one-time law pupil, Oliver Mowat, was imported from Toronto to run against him — it was no accident that Mowat was a prominent teetotaller. Kingston rejected the interloper by 785 votes to 484, a come-down from Macdonald’s eleven hundred vote triumph in 1857. He owed his victory to Catholic voters, many of whom backed him as the lesser of two evils. Macdonald’s majority was less secure than it appeared.
The Conservatives did well across Upper Canada but, paradoxically, success added to Macdonald’s problems. To his puzzlement, “the dry bones of Pre-Adamite Toryism” had stirred into new life. By abolishing the clergy reserves, he had done the extreme Tories the favour of freeing them from an unpopular cause. The 1861 elections were held soon after preliminary results from that year’s census showed that Upper Canada now had 1.4 million people, well ahead of Lower Canada’s 1.1 million. Tories increasingly vented their contempt for French Catholics under the fair-play guise of demanding representation by population. Macdonald condemned the “violent Tories” who stupidly believed “that a purely Conservative Government can be formed.” Any such attempt would merely reunite all brands of Reformers, who collectively had a built-in majority in go-ahead Upper Canada. “I am not such a fool as to destroy all that I have been doing for the last 7 years.” But when Cabinet changes were needed in March 1862, it was impossible to find any Conservative opposed to rep. by pop. Indeed, the Tories demanded that they should dominate the government. An emerging Lower Canadian centre group, the Mauves (a mixture of Rouge and Bleu) added to the instability.
The outbreak of the American Civil War created fresh challenges. In November 1861 a Northern warship seized two Southern envoys travelling to Europe on a British steamship. Britain angrily demanded an apology, and war was briefly threatened. The crisis destroyed any lingering belief that the Empire could protect Canada from invasion. British reinforcements were rushed across the Atlantic, although the lack of a railway from Halifax prevented most from reaching the interior of Canada. The imperial garrison was boosted to 14,000 troops. This would have deterred the 16,000-strong pre-1861 United States Army, but it was useless against the massive forces engaged in the Civil War: the North suffered 15,000 casualties in a single week of battles in June 1862 — and went on fighting.
Nominally, every adult male from sixteen to fifty served in Canada’s militia: that was why Macdonald had marched against Mackenzie’s rebels in 1837. Now, as the first-ever minister of militia, he introduced a sweeping reform measure, to create a part-time army, intensively (and expensively) trained. The details of his Militia Bill were both vague and alarming. Military experts spoke of training 100,000 men; Macdonald talked of 50,000, maybe costing a million dollars. Financially, this was a nightmare: Galt’s latest budget already planned to spend $12 million — but revenue would be only $7 million. If there were too few volunteers, conscription would make up the numbers, something especially unpopular in French Canada. Cartier seemed notably unenthusiastic about his own government’s proposal, and Macdonald’s handling of the measure was lacklustre. Worse still, some days the bill stalled because the minister did not appear in Parliament. Macdonald’s absences were caused “nominally by illness,” noted the new governor general, Lord Monck, “but really, as every one knows, by drunkenness.” On May 20, 1862, a Bleu revolt defeated the Militia Bill, and Cartier’s ministry resigned.
Calling defeat “a grateful tonic,” Macdonald put his usual favourable spin on events. “I chose a soft bed to fall upon ... I fell in a blaze of loyalty.” Perhaps a new phase was opening in his career. The death of Helen Macdonald in October 1862 freed him from acting out his mother’s ambitions. Soon afterwards, he made a private visit to England on Trust and Loan Company business: maybe, at last, he could concentrate on making some money. Although claiming to be “thoroughly sick of official life,” Macdonald still planned to exercise political influence, “to keep my place in parliament ... I can do more good there.” But while he remained in politics, sheer ability made him an inescapable choice as party leader. Even in the aftermath of the Militia Bill debacle, the “immeasurably inferior” John Hillyard Cameron failed to oust him as caucus leader. As the governor of New Brunswick wrote in 1865, “Macdonald (when not drunk) is a really powerful man.” Once again, John A. Macdonald dealt with the alcohol issue by announcing he would join the temperance movement.
The new premier, Sandfield Macdonald, skilfully kept his insecure ministry afloat for twenty-two months. Unfortunately, his big idea, the double majority, ensured that the divided province achieved little at a time when there were so many challenges to tackle. John A. Macdonald even put out feelers for a possible alliance with George Brown. Brown replied that he would “sustain” a Conservative ministry if it enacted representation by population. However, he rejected coalition as “demoralizing” and refused “friendly personal intercourse” with Macdonald until his 1856 allegations were “entirely withdrawn.”
John A. Macdonald promised to provide “gentlemanlike and patriotic opposition” in Parliament. Sandfield’s ministry was “in a great mess & cannot possibly go on, but I am doing what I can to keep them up,” he claimed in March 1863. “They will fall from their own weakness and not from the attacks of the opposition.” Six weeks later, as mighty American armies clashed at Chancellorsville, he carried a censure motion and forced Sandfield into a general election: continental crisis had not yet compelled Canada’s politicians to soar above faction fighting. Campaigning as “a simple citizen of Kingston,” Macdonald faced Reformer Overton S. Gildersleeve, a young, respected, and highly successful local businessman. Gildersleeve’s vote equalled Mowat’s 1861 tally, marking him as a long-term threat. The Conservatives did badly across Upper Canada but the overall political situation remained unstable. Sandfield clung to a wafer-thin majority but, on March 21, 1864, he staged a tactical resignation, boasting that his opponents could not replace him.
At first, John A. Macdonald refused to accept office: he had “strong private reasons urging him to look more closely to his own affairs.” Once again, the wild card of mortality had intervened. Although only forty-one, his partner, Archie John MacDonell, was fatally ill: his death, on March 27, automatically dissolved their law firm. Winding up their joint accounts would reveal that the practice was chronically insolvent. “It was utter ruin to me to return to the Government and I declined,” Macdonald later recalled. Taking office would also mean fighting a ministerial by-election, and Macdonald had probably concluded months earlier that the ambitious Gildersleeve would throw money into such a contest which the near-bankrupt John A. could not match. But death took a hand here too. On March 9, aged just thirty-nine, Gildersleeve died of a heart attack. Kingston’s Reformers had no obvious alternative candidate, and John A. Macdonald might survive a by-election after all.
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