The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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Canada against the Americans, and seemed to view Confederation as a step towards transatlantic disengagement. The delegation’s major achievement, as Macdonald put it, was that they “happily succeeded in keeping the question alive” in Britain. The British government issued a strong declaration of support for Confederation, enough to ward off immediate pressure to restructure the province of Canada alone. For Macdonald, there was also a personal prize: Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate. Oxford ceremonies could be raucous, but “Mr. Macdonald, the Canadian, had a good reception.” To be announced back at Government House as “Dr. Macdonald” offered some consolation for the inadequacy of his own education: Gowan thought that the Oxford degree “would gratify you more than a knighthood.” Macdonald modestly accepted the honour on behalf of Canada, but it was noteworthy that he was singled out as the recipient.
Soon after Macdonald’s return to Canada, there was a sharp, sad reminder of the tight agenda facing the coalition. Premier Taché had sacrificed his health in launching the new Canada, and died on July 30, 1865. An incandescent George Brown blocked Lord Monck’s attempt to appoint John A. Macdonald as Taché’s successor. Brown’s price for accepting the Quebec City lawyer Sir Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau (a member of Macdonald’s 1857–58 Cabinet) as compromise premier was the re-statement of the coalition’s dual objective, reaffirming the commitment to create a purely Canadian federation if the wider project stalled. The deadline was shifted back to 1866.
With Belleau a figurehead, Macdonald effectively led the government. Paradoxically, political leadership involved keeping the lid on Canadian politics to avoid rows that might inflame Maritime suspicions. Upper and Lower Canada would enter Confederation as separate provinces (named Ontario and Quebec in 1867) but Canadians were left to perform their own bisection. Discussion of the new provincial constitutions would certainly reignite controversy over Catholic schools. Since the Irish Catholic vote was important in New Brunswick, Macdonald simply delayed the 1866 session of Canada’s legislature. New Brunswick politicians insisted that they favoured uniting the provinces but disliked the Quebec Conference terms — but Canada’s Parliament had signed up to the Quebec package. As Macdonald explained, once Canada’s legislature met, ministers would be “pressed to declare whether we adhered to the Quebec resolutions or not.” To answer “yes” would condemn his New Brunswick allies to defeat, but “no” would outrage French Canada: either way would be “good-bye to Federation.” In his later career, Macdonald would be nicknamed “Old Tomorrow.” In the winter of 1865–66, he first showed his skills at procrastination.
Throughout the winter of 1865–66, reports from New Brunswick confidently predicted the slow-motion disintegration of opposition to Confederation. Tilley became premier again in April 1866, and in a June election he won a pro-Union election majority — helped by campaign funds quietly raised among Macdonald’s Canadian supporters. Meanwhile, in December 1865, George Brown resigned from the coalition, ostensibly over the handling of trade talks in Washington: characteristically, if unrealistically, Brown had argued that the provinces should stand up to the Americans and force them to renew the cross-border Reciprocity Treaty. Cartier and Campbell tried to persuade Brown not to quit, but for Macdonald, the parting was a relief, the more so as the other Reformers in the coalition preferred working with John A. to taking orders from George Brown. However, Brown’s resignation meant that the Globe could resume its vendetta against Macdonald. It was not long before John A. Macdonald supplied the pretext.
Symbolic of the approaching new era, Canada’s capital finally moved to Ottawa. Macdonald founded the elite Rideau Club to provide social amenities, but the city’s general lack of facilities — ominously, Ottawa lacked even a piped water supply — had what Lord Monck discreetly called “a damaging effect on public men.” Despite the fiasco of 1862, Macdonald was once again minister of militia, and bearing a heavy responsibility. With the end of the Civil War, Irish-American soldiers joined the Fenians who planned to attack Canada. Mobilizing Canada’s defence forces every time there was an invasion alarm would paralyze the provincial economy, but failure to respond to a credible warning would risk Canadian lives. Macdonald struck the right balance: 14,000 part-time soldiers were called out on May 31, the day nine hundred Fenians crossed the Niagara River. Two days later, the paramilitaries killed nine militiamen at the Battle of Ridgeway. The invaders withdrew and the American authorities belatedly tightened up border security, but the threat remained. Macdonald dismissed calls for the summary arrest of suspected Fenian sympathizers: “illiterate magistrates” would simply persecute their peaceable Catholic neighbours. It was difficult to persuade the public that the government was on top of the danger. “Because they do not see what we are doing in the Newspapers, they think we are doing nothing.”
The delay caused by New Brunswick was not the only constraint on the Confederation timetable. By the time Canada’s legislature finally met in June 1866, the governor general was “uneasy.” Britain’s Parliament generally took a holiday between August and February, but in 1866 an autumn session seemed likely to tackle a political crisis over parliamentary reform. Lord Monck wanted to complete Canada’s preparations, travel to London, and pass the Confederation act before the close of 1866. On June 21, he threatened to resign if Confederation faltered. Macdonald read the governor general a polite lecture on constitutional responsibility, urging Monck to trust “my Canadian Parliamentary experience.” As for Confederation, “success is certain, and it is now not even a question of strategy. It is merely one of tactics.” But uncertainty returned when Britain’s Liberal government resigned and an inexperienced minority Conservative ministry took office. There would be no autumn session, and if the parliamentary reform issue could not be resolved when Westminster reassembled early in 1867, a British general election would follow. Nova Scotians were due to vote too, around June 1867. Although the colony’s politicians had fallen into line with New Brunswick, proud Bluenoses might well reject Confederation.
Drafting legislation would require “weeks of anxious and constant labour” in England, but preparations seemed lethargic in Ottawa. Proposed local constitutions for Upper and Lower Canada were introduced on July 13, 1866, but there was no sense of urgency about ratifying them. On August 6, the Globe denounced the delay as “shameful,” ominously blaming “Ministerial incapacity.” It was “the common talk of Ottawa” that Macdonald was responding to pressure in his usual deplorably liquid way: Monck’s resignation threat had likely been a coded warning. In mid-August, the Globe abandoned all restraint to report that Macdonald had made a “wild and incoherent” speech in Parliament, proof that he was “in a state of gross intoxication.” George Brown’s newspaper broadened its attack over a three-week period. Never before, it claimed, had a Cabinet minister been “seen to hold on to his desk to prevent himself from falling … with utterance so thick as to be almost incomprehensible … so utterly gone at mid-day as to be unconscious of what he was doing.” Macdonald’s drunken bouts threatened the “postponement of Confederation.”
Macdonald’s alcohol problem was no secret, but public attitudes to drink were ambivalent. One supporter even urged him “not to rely on Cold Water, & tea, & coffee alone, to sustain your not very robust &, sometimes over-wrought frame.” Macdonald had twice publicly admitted his need to reform, but the temperance groups he joined were widely viewed as cranks and killjoys. Macdonald often joked about his weakness, claiming that Canadians preferred John A. drunk to George Brown sober. Legend claimed that Macdonald once shocked an audience by vomiting during a public debate, but charmed them by explaining that his opponent’s policies turned his stomach. Pressures of the Confederation timetable plus his lonely Ottawa existence probably explain why Macdonald was drinking heavily. Friendship with fellow minister D’Arcy McGee, another notorious boozer, worsened the problem. The Globe declared that “never before were two Ministers of the Crown seen at one time rolling helplessly on the Ministerial bench.” Legend claimed that Macdonald told his colleague that the Cabinet could not afford two drunks — so McGee must give up alcohol. Macdonald threatened to sue, but the case never came to court, and even his apologists did not deny the stories. Instead, his defenders organized a banquet in his honour, held at Kingston on September 5, where the impressively sober guest of honour obliquely deplored the “wanton and unprovoked attack” upon him. Guest speakers lavished generous praise as damage limitation, but one speech was so exaggerated it almost destroyed Macdonald’s career.
Leading