The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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labour that forceps were used to deliver “a healthy & strong boy.” In a brisk allusion to her sister’s opium addiction, Maria Macpherson commented that it was no wonder the baby was very thin, “seeing he had been living on pills so long.” Named “John Alexander” after his father, the child also inherited his famous nose. Maria whisked him back to Kingston to be cared for with her own brood. In an age of high mortality, the survival of both mother and child was a triumph — a point bizarrely driven home when Isabella’s obstetrician suddenly died four weeks later. Despite Macdonald’s intentions to stay in New York, he was soon forced to leave his “agitated” wife and return to his “solitary & miserable” life in Montreal. Worse still, her new doctor believed that Isabella’s problems were psychological and sought to boost her confidence by persuading her to walk the length of her bedroom. She collapsed totally, and did not muster the strength to return to Kingston for a further nine months. Meanwhile, Macdonald’s mother suffered a series of strokes, stretching the family womanpower to the limits. Forced to hire nurses for Isabella, Macdonald wrote that “we are in a nice mess.”
But Canada’s problems took priority, and the province needed its receiver-general at his desk. In the fall of 1847, an international banking crisis threatened government finances. Macdonald notified London banks of Cabinet’s decision to raise the interest rates on Canadian bonds, thus giving himself useful name-recognition in the world’s leading financial centre. The elections followed, and Macdonald no longer talked of only serving a single term.
Not only did he mobilize Kingston’s Orangemen against a challenge from Tory Thomas Kirkpatrick, himself an Irish Protestant, but he also attempted to woo the city’s Catholic bishop. Macdonald was handily re-elected, but the Reformers triumphed across the province. Macdonald’s colleagues remained in office as caretakers until the new Assembly met in March 1848 and deposed them. Oddly enough, this graveyard shift witnessed an intense period of activity, the foundation of Macdonald’s reputation for efficient administration. During the election campaign, he had switched portfolios to become commissioner of Crown Lands, and now he launched a whirlwind attack on its somnolent bureaucracy. The Trust and Loan Company needed reliable title deeds to issue mortgages, and delays in paperwork at Crown Lands were bad for business.
Macdonald’s brief ministerial career was the prelude to six years of powerless opposition: as he confessed to an importunate constituent in 1849, “I have no influence whatever.” Yet, despite domestic, professional, and political problems, he remained in Parliament. In June 1848, Isabella returned to Kingston, bearing the journey from New York “wonderfully well.” To create personal space for his wife, Macdonald rented a house on the edge of Kingston, where the cooling breeze off Lake Ontario perhaps triggered a resurgence of her facial tic. Isabella ran the household from her bedroom. Having lived on a Georgia slave plantation, she was tough on servants: Macdonald nicknamed her the “Invisible Lady.”
A happy and alert child, “John the younger” was cared for by a nurse but spent hours energetically playing with toys on his mother’s bed. Isabella confessed to her sister: “my very soul is bound up in him.... did I not purchase him dearly?” The little boy was “in good health” when his first birthday was celebrated in August 1848. Seven weeks later, he was dead. One account mentions a fall, another convulsions: perhaps he tumbled from Isabella’s bed and sustained head injuries? Of course, his parents never fully overcame their grief. Moving house in Ottawa in 1883, Macdonald’s second wife discovered a mysterious box of toys: her husband quietly identified them as “little John A.’s.” Isabella became trapped in a cycle of grief, pain, opium, and prostration. She was greatly distressed when her husband travelled to Montreal for the February 1849 parliamentary session — but Macdonald insisted that his attendance was “a matter of necessity.”
Although he maintained his low profile, the 1849 session became a landmark in Macdonald’s career. The new Reform ministry proposed to pay compensation for damage caused by government forces in Lower Canada during the 1837–38 rebellions. Convicted rebels were excluded — but very few insurgents had actually been prosecuted in those troubled times. Sympathy for the rebels had been widespread among French Canadians, and paying off claims for damage was a form of peace process, drawing a line under a tragic episode. But Tories violently objected to compensating the disloyal and embarked on a high risk strategy of reckless protest, designed to force the British government to intervene and restore them as Canada’s natural rulers. Macdonald denounced the compensation proposals as “most shameful,” and almost fought a duel with a Reform minister. But, as in 1837, he disapproved of extremism and fell silent as the temperature rose dangerously. Even amidst the cauldron of party hatred, he needed to pass technical legislation for the Commercial Bank.
In April 1849, he secured leave of absence from the Assembly for “urgent private business,” probably another crisis in Isabella’s health. He was lucky to get away from Montreal. On April 25, the city’s anglophone mob burned down the parliament buildings. Macdonald condemned their behaviour, although he also blamed ministers for provoking popular anger. Arrogant and violent, the Tories had gone too far. Some even showed the hypocrisy of their vaunted allegiance to Queen Victoria by threatening to join the United States. The Conservative Party needed urgent reconstruction.
As a punishment, Montreal ceased to be Canada’s capital. Parliament would meet first in Toronto and then go to Quebec City for five years. Macdonald insisted that “the system of alternate Parliaments would never do”: Canada needed a permanent capital and Kingston was an attractive compromise. A new organization offered a way of rebuilding the party and boosting the city. In July 1849, 150 delegates gathered there for Canada’s first political convention, to launch the British American League, which aimed to broaden Conservative support with new policies. Macdonald was a backstage organizer: as the Globe remarked, “he never says much anywhere except in barrooms.” His aim was to create a new party organization, while demonstrating that Kingston’s City Hall could host Canada’s Parliament. As Macdonald hoped, the convention “put its foot on the idea of annexation.” However, he displayed no enthusiasm for the League’s alternative policy, the union of British North America, an early proposal for Confederation.
At forty, Isabella was expecting a second child. A painful and sleepless pregnancy was exacerbated by grief at the death of her sister Jane in November 1849, but the following March she gave birth to a son, Hugh John. “I never expected another,” Macdonald admitted. To add to the pressures upon him, in September 1849, Macdonald lost his law partner. Alexander Campbell admired his mentor but he could not cope with Macdonald’s casual business practices. Although working relations with Campbell subsequently improved, the breach of 1849 never completely healed. Four months later, Macdonald likened himself to “a thief on a treadmill” as he tried to maintain his practice single handed until he could find a new partner. To save money and escape unhappy memories, the Macdonalds moved back into town. Isabella’s health was worrying and expensive: for a time, she was so weak that she was “unable to raise her hand to her head.” A medical bill for fourteen months in 1850–51 shows that her doctor visited 132 times — a home call every three days — at a dollar a consultation.
Over the next five years, before his return to office in 1854, Macdonald’s priority was to strengthen his finances. He achieved some short-term success, but at the price of long-range problems. In 1850, he persuaded the Assembly to exempt the Trust and Loan Company from the Usury Laws so that it could charge higher interest rates. Macdonald promptly crossed the Atlantic to recruit British investors. Calling him “a respectable man and tolerably moderate in his views,” Lord Elgin helped Macdonald make contacts in London. Effectively, the Canadian operation was converted into a financial branch-plant under British control, giving Macdonald valuable experience in dealing with the elite who ran the Empire. The company’s Canadian headquarters remained in Kingston, where Macdonald was returned by acclamation in the 1851 election. For the rest of his life, Trust and Loan Company business helped subsidize his political career.
Unfortunately, John A. Macdonald was less successful as a speculator. His preferred strategy was to make a down-payment on a block of land and quickly sell it at a profit, settling the balance of the purchase price from the proceeds and pocketing the gain. In a spectacular deal in 1852–53, he invested a $1,000 deposit to secure land worth $5,060, which was soon sold for $9,400 — $4,360