John A (11 page)

Isabella's downstairs bedroom at Bellevue House in Kingston. It was from here, while bedridden, that she ran the household like “the Invisible Lady.”

Many would have buckled. Macdonald just got down to doing what he could. He conceived the idea—presumably on the advice of doctors—of taking Isabella to Savannah in the Deep South, where she might better regain her strength by escaping the long blast of a Canadian winter. Before leaving, he had to sort out a family dispute caused by his own sister Margaret (Moll) refusing to accompany Isabella partway southwards, as she'd undertaken to do, because she had to remain behind to watch over their mother. Eventually, Margaret agreed to go with them as far as
Oswego, New York, and Macdonald then set off. It was a nightmare journey. Transportation systems were rough and ready; accommodation for travellers was spartan. On July 18 he wrote to Margaret Greene from Oswego: “We arrived here this morning at about one o'clock my dearest sister. The exhaustion produced by carrying Isabella down to the boat was dreadful to witness. We thought she would die on the dock…. The weather was so stormy, that all our party were sick, Isabella dreadfully so, and yet strange to say her health and strength seemed to return to her.” They went on to Syracuse, and then, by train, to Philadelphia, where “her fatigues were very great and she was obliged to subdue pain by opium, but still she kept up her spirits & at about four o'clock we arrived at this House. Only think what a journey she had. First to be carried down a narrow stair at Jersey & over to the cars; 2nd a journey in the cars for about 70 miles to Bristol; 3rd To be carried in a chair from the cars to a steamboat, 4th a voyage of 22 miles to this city, and lastly and worst of all a quarter of a mile's drive in a hack over rough streets…. She from fatigue and opium combined slept from 10 o'clock last night until the morning and is now easy and in good spirits. She never speaks of it, but I am perfectly conscious of how much she suffers.”

A few days later, still in Philadelphia, in another letter to Margaret, Macdonald recounted, first, that Isabella “exerted herself too much, so that in the evening she was a good deal exhausted, and was threatened by tic, so that she had recourse to opium,” and then reported, “She has had a good day today, has walked a good deal & eaten pretty well.” In early November they reached Baltimore, where they had reserved rooms in a hotel near the railway station, but finding them wholly unsatisfactory they moved to another establishment. “The consequence of all this was great exhaustion and great suffering by Isabella. She was in great agony all night, and was obliged to have recourse to opium,
externally and internally in great quantities.” On a brighter note, Macdonald reported that “Isa…says she does not anticipate suffering from our today's journey, as the weather is calm.”

At the small town of Petersburgh, he wrote, “The house we stayed in was dirty, the food badly dressed and the beds overrun by ants.” They hurried on the 160 miles to Wilmington: “She bore it like a
Shero
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as she is, but as you may well believe dreadfully exhausted by the exertion. She passed a miserable night and continues today to pay the penalty for her extra exertions.” On a cheerier note, Macdonald reported they had passed their time reading a “strange mélange” of books, among them
The Bible in Spain,
Thomas Carlyle's
Life of Schiller,
Bishop Moore's
Sermons,
and were about to “take up Lord Mahon's
History of England.
”

They pressed on, by steamer, reaching Savannah on November 20 after a calm journey—“There was scarcely a curl on the sea.” There they rented two “quiet” rooms. Isabella, though, “has been very miserable since our arrival. The tic encouraged by her weakness from fatigue has made a furious attack upon her which she is
manfully
resisting with the assistance of the blister and the pill-box.” Now that he was in the Deep South and it was late November, Macdonald appreciated the benefits of being there. “The weather here is so fine & warm that I cannot fancy it winter at all.” He would have loved to stay, rather than going back “among the frosts & snows of Canada, sucking my paws like any other bear.” Political duties compelled him to return, though. He made an adroit appeal to Margaret Greene to enable him to slip
away: “I need not say however that it would afford me great pleasure to reflect that you were near her, when I am far away.”

Macdonald's manipulation achieved its purpose. In a letter sent from Kingston on February 27, 1846, he told Margaret, “I am sanguine in my hopes and belief, that in the fine climate she [Isa] now enjoys, and under your affectionate and judicious care she may yet be restored to me, in health, strength and spirits.”

No such recovery occurred. Instead, a miracle did. After a reunion late in 1846, Isabella let Macdonald know that she was pregnant. He moved her to New York, where medical standards were higher (and a great deal more expensive). On April 5, 1847, he wrote to Margaret Greene from New York—“this American Babylon”—to report: “Doctor Washington still says she is in very critical condition arising from the continued attacks of uterine neuralgia. These attacks, he apprehends, may bring on a premature confinement…. Still he is not without hopes of being able to prevent an abortion. She is quite calm & resolute, and is much encouraged by Maria's presence.” (Maria was yet another of Isabella's sisters, of whom there were four in all.)

That summer, Macdonald's mother suffered a third stroke. He wrote encouragingly to her that “such attacks are not uncommon in aged people.” He then switched to some role-reversing nagging: “These illnesses should have the effect of inducing you to be more particular in keeping your system in order, and conquering your antipathy to medicine.”

But soon it was time for an exultant letter. On August 2, 1847, Macdonald was able to write to his mother from New York that Isabella had gone into labour and a specialist, a Dr. Rodgers, had come to administer “the
Lethean
or somnific gas,” although able
to risk only a small dose because of her weakness. “She suffered dreadfully all night and about 8 this morning was so weak that the Doctors determined to use the forceps, as she was quite unable to deliver herself. They succeeded to a miracle, and I am delighted to tell you that she was delivered of a healthy & strong boy.” The child instantly dominated their lives. Macdonald reported triumphantly to Margaret Greene that “his eyes are dark blue,
very large & nose
to match. When born his length was 1 foot 9 inches & very strong and healthy, though thin, but as Maria told Dr. Washington, that was not to be wondered at, seeing he had been living on pills for so long.” Isabella, at the end of her “headlong” letter to Margaret Greene, for once found the words to express what she truly wanted to say: “My very soul is bound up in him. God pardon me if I sin in this. But did I not purchase him dearly?” They named their baby son John Alexander.

By September, Macdonald was back in Canada—and back in politics. “Our poor Isabella was a good deal agitated at my leaving her,” he tells Margaret Greene in a letter written from Montreal. “The
Boy
is flourishing like a
Green bay Horse
so writes Margaret [his own sister Margaret, who'd gone down to New York], and that he is becoming strong & fat.” Isabella remained in New York that winter, cared for by her sister Maria, while Macdonald's sister Margaret returned to Kingston to look after their mother. Macdonald himself was now alone, in Montreal, where the government had moved. He told Margaret Greene, “I feel quite solitary & miserable living in lodgings alone. I would spend a pleasant winter if Isabella were only here.”

In the late spring of 1848, Isabella came back from New York to join Macdonald in Kingston. They moved to Bellevue, an airy Tuscan-style villa with large, well-landscaped grounds. Its usual nickname was the Pekoe Pagoda, but Macdonald called it the Eyetalian Willar. (It is now a National Historic Site of Canada.) A
particular attraction of the house for Isabella was its distance from the noise of the town, which always upset her. A far greater attraction, of course, as Macdonald wrote to Margaret Greene, was “the society of her boy. At first he was shy and uncomfortable in her room, which is to some degree darkened and as she could not handle him, or toss him about, which the young gentleman insists upon from all who approach him.” But “he is now however great friends with her, and sits most contentedly in the bed with her, surrounded by his toys which he throws about, much to her inconvenience I am sure, tho' she will allow it.”

A miniature of an oil portrait of Isabella by William Sawyer, dated 1852.

If the spirit was now willing, the flesh was soon assailed again. On August 1, 1848, Macdonald informed Margaret that Isabella was consistently coughing. “On her route & after her arrival [home], there were occasional appearances of blood from her lungs…. [Dr. Hayward] discerns no symptoms of ulceration or permanent affection—but I fear, I fear.” A few days later, he confirmed the alarming new symptom. “The chief cause of uneasiness is the occasional appearance of blood in her handkerchief when she coughs.” A fortnight later, Dr. Hayward told him that “the cough & the blood of course indicate something wrong, some cause of irritation. And yet she has none of the evidence on which a medical man could state there was any ulceration.” Still, the baby John Alexander was there to lift her spirits: “He sits by the hour now with his Mother as contentedly as possible, and smiles & crows away from one end of day to the other.”

Three weeks later, a nurse went to check on John Alexander in
his room next door to Isabella's on the ground floor. He was still and cold in his cot. “Convulsions” was the explanation given; it may have been sudden infant death syndrome. He was buried in the Garrison Burial Ground near the grave of the grandfather he'd never seen, Hugh Macdonald.

In those days, the death of young children was common. This infant, though, had been brought into the world amid excruciating pain, and during his brief life he had given to his mother and father a joy they had never dared imagine they might possess. He was never forgotten.

In 1865, the remains of the infant John A., as well as those of Hugh Macdonald, originally interred in the old Garrison Burial Ground that was by now in a state of disrepair, were removed to the new Cataraqui Cemetery (of which Macdonald was a founding subscriber) and there placed in the family's burial plot. Many years later, Macdonald's second wife, Agnes, came upon a small dusty box while cleaning the attic of Earnscliffe, their house in Ottawa. Inside it were some odd wooden objects. When she showed them to her husband, Macdonald explained they were John Alexander's toys; through all the many moves he had made from city to city and from house to lodging house to bachelor quarters and back again to a house, Macdonald had kept with him these relics of his lost son.

Thereafter, Macdonald's marriage became “a grey, unrelieved tragedy,” in the fine phrase of his principal biographer, Donald Creighton. From then on, and until his life was over, he applied all his passion to politics.

 

SEVEN

New Guys with New Ideas

The British people of the North American Colonies are a people on whom we may safely rely, and to whom we must not grudge power. Lord Durham, in his report of 1839

B
y luck, Macdonald began his political career in 1844, at the best possible time for a newcomer to arrive at least in the wings of the political stage. Shortly before he got there, the Canadian political system had been decisively shaken up and had set off in an entirely new direction. Shortly afterwards, the system was galvanized by the introduction into it of a new, almost revolutionary, idea in governance. The decisive change was caused by a new constitution that joined the two previously separate colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (today, Ontario and Quebec) into the United Province of Canada; for the first time, the country's two European peoples, French and English, were brought into direct political contact. The almost revolutionary idea was that of Responsible Government: it called for the colony's government to be responsible to the elected legislature, not, as before, to the governor general. Under the old system, the governor general exercised unchallengable authority as the personal representative of the monarch; he
selected and appointed all the ministers, who then functioned as his ministers rather than as those of the legislature and the voters. Transferring responsibility to elected ministers who commanded a majority in the legislature effectively ceded to the colony full self-government in domestic affairs. Only Confederation, still two decades away, would change the country as radically as these two measures.

For the politicians, whether Macdonald or anyone else, the effect was like that of a comprehensive spring cleaning. As Creighton observed in
The Young Politician,
almost all the leading political figures of the era before Responsible Government “failed, with astonishing uniformity, to survive very long in the new political atmosphere.” Macdonald thus joined the system at the very moment when it was time for new guys with new ideas. Except that Macdonald did not—yet—have any new ideas. He survived, nevertheless, because he was street-smart and a quick learner. Still, he contributed nothing to the transformational changes themselves, and it took him time to figure out how to take advantage of the extra space at the top that had just been opened up for someone like him.

Macdonald also had to cope with practical constraints. During his first term, from 1844 to 1848, he was a backbencher, literally as well as figuratively, because he chose to sit in the very back row. His appearances on the actual stage itself were in the junior cabinet posts of receiver general and commissioner of Crown lands, in each instance briefly. During his second term, from 1848 to 1852, he sat in opposition, because the Conservative government had lost to the Reform Party. Mostly what he did during this time was to listen and learn, to make useful contacts and to acquire insider know-how, all of which would be highly useful, whether he chose to give politics up for the law or try clambering up the ladder.

As an even more practical constraint, Macdonald was having problems with his law practice. Campbell complained, justifiably, that he was being underpaid, particularly because Macdonald was often absent on political business. In 1846 they rewrote their original agreement, this time dividing the general profits equally between them, giving Campbell a third of the Commercial Bank business and allowing him a lump payment of £250 a year to compensate for Macdonald's absences. This arrangement tightened Macdonald's finances at the very time he had to look after a permanently invalided wife as well as his mother, who kept suffering strokes even while recovering from the latest, and provide for the financial needs of his unmarried sisters, Margaret and Louisa.

Before we carry on with the chronicle of Macdonald's career, it's necessary—anyway, it ought to be useful—to describe the new political environment within which Macdonald now found himself operating.

Here, all readers to whom this mid-nineteenth-century period of Canadian politics is a well-annotated book should jump ahead to the next chapter. However, their ranks may be relatively thin. A great many Canadians have come to assume that their country began on July 1, 1867, not least because we celebrate each year that anniversary of Confederation. But Confederation wasn't the starting point of all that we now have and are. It developed from its own past, and that past, even if now far distant from us, still materially affects our present and our future.

The most explicit description of the continuity of Canadian politics across the centuries is made by historian Gordon Stewart in his book
The Origins of Canadian Politics.
There he writes, “The
key to understanding the main features of Canadian national political culture after 1867 lies in the political world of Upper and Lower Canada between the 1790s and the 1860s.”
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His argument, one shared fully by this author, is that all Canadian politics, even those in our own postmodern, high-tech, twenty-first-century present, have been influenced substantively by events and attitudes in the horse-and-buggy Canada of our dim past.

One key example would be the role of political patronage in Canadian politics. Except on rare occasions, our two mainstream parties have either no ideology at all or only fragments of it. Their distinguishing difference is not in their titles, Liberal and Conservative, but in the fact that, at any one time, one party is in and the other is out. Without patronage, it would be just about impossible for either organization to function as a national party. Other motives, of course, attract individuals to join one or other of the mainstream parties, which alternate, rather irregularly, in office: idealism, the attraction of public service and, no less, the adrenaline high that is generated by the fierce competitiveness of the political game. But the prospect of good, high-status jobs matters as critically—in effect, no patronage, no national political parties. (Regional parties have in their very regionalism a substitute for ideology, as do the rarer ideology-driven parties like the New Democrats and the Greens.) Two international comparisons may confirm the point: in Britain, from which we originally copied a great deal, there is relatively little patronage but a considerable difference in ideology between Labour and Conservative; in the United States, always our principal comparison, there is about as much patronage as there is north of the border, but Democrats and Republicans differ in their ideology or, perhaps more particularly these days, in their cultural
assumptions. Patronage really is as Canadian as maple syrup.

Lord Durham, known as “Radical Jack.” He found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” and set out to assimilate the second one—les Canadiens.

Another example, this one unique to Canada, is the effect on our political system of the ongoing alliance of convenience between the French and the English, or now, more accurately, of francophones and English-speaking Canadians. No less so before Confederation than after it, whichever party has been able to forge a partnership with francophone Quebecers has almost automatically become the government and remained in power for a long time. Few of Macdonald's political insights were as perceptive as his recognition early on that a stable national government would be impossible without abundant amounts of patronage and a close, mutually self-interested apportionment of the spoils (including that generated by government spending) between the French and the English.

Now to go back to our future, this of course being also Macdonald's present.

The catalyst of fundamental change in pre-Confederation politics were the rebellions in 1837–38 by the Patriotes in Lower Canada led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, which was a serious uprising, and by the rebels in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie, which was more of a tragicomedy. Both uprisings provided a warning to London that, as had gone the American colonies a
half-century earlier, so the colonies of British North America might also go. To deal with the crisis, the Imperial government sent out one of its best and brightest.

John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, arrived accompanied by an orchestra, several race horses, a full complement of silver and a cluster of brainy aides, one of whom had achieved celebrity status by running off with a teenage heiress and serving time briefly in jail. Still in his early forties, “Radical Jack” was cerebral, cold, acerbic and arrogant. After just five months in the colony, he left in a rage after a decision of his—to exile many of the Patriotes to Bermuda without the bother of a trial—was countermanded by the Colonial Office. Back home, he completed, in 1839, a report that was perhaps the single most important public document in all Canadian history.
^*33
Lord Durham himself died of tuberculosis a year later.

Parts of Durham's report were brilliant; parts were brutal. The effects of each were identical: they both had an extraordinarily creative effect on Canada and Canadians. The brutal parts of Durham's diagnosis are, as almost always happens, much the better known. He had found here, he declared, “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state…a struggle, not of principles, but of races.”
^†34
The French Canadians,
les Canadiens,
had to lose—for
their own sake. They were “a people destitute of all that could constitute a nationality…brood[ing] in sullen silence over the memory of their fallen countrymen, of their burnt villages, of their ruined property, of their extinguished ascendancy.”

In fact, Durham was almost as harsh about the English in Canada. They were “hardly better off than the French for the means of education for their children.” They were almost as indolent: “On the American side, all is activity and hustle…. On the British side of the line, except for a few favoured spots, all seems waste and desolate.” He dismissed the powerful Family Compact as “these wretches.” Still, he took it for granted that Anglo-Saxons would dominate the French majority in their own Lower Canada. “The entire wholesale and a large portion of the retail trade of the Province, with the most profitable and flourishing farms, are now in the hands of this dominant minority.” All French Canadians could do was “look upon their rivals with alarm, with jealousy, and finally with hatred.”

The only way to end this perpetual clash between the “races,” Durham concluded, was for there to be just one race in Canada. The two separate, ethnically defined provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada should be combined into the United Province of Canada. As immigrants poured in from the British Isles, the French would inevitably become a minority. To quicken the pace of assimilation, the use of French should cease in the new, single legislature and government. To minimize the political weight of Lower Canada's 650,000 people, compared with Upper Canada's 450,000, each former province, now reduced to a “section,” should have an equal number of members in the new legislature.
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