John A (17 page)

As attorney general, Macdonald now had a quite comfortable income of £1,250 a year. He was able to sort out without strain many of the responsibilities that fell to him as head of the family. In 1852 a most unexpected family event had occurred: his sister Margaret, aged thirty-nine, married James Williamson, a professor of science at Queen's University.
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It was a successful marriage, and Macdonald developed a high regard for Williamson, who, although bookish and humourless, was well liked by colleagues and students. Macdonald's nickname for Williamson, an ordained Presbyterian minister, was the affectionately teasing term “the Parson.”

Margaret's marriage left Louisa isolated as the remaining unmarried sister. Macdonald arranged for her to move into the
Williamson household with their mother, Helen, for whom she had been caring. Showing the Macdonald streak of stubborn independence, Louisa insisted that she not go there as a dependant. Macdonald's solution was inventive and perhaps unique. He rented the house—Heathfield—that the Williamsons owned, naming Louisa as his representative. This arrangement ensured that, technically, the Williamsons were now boarding with Louisa in their own house. Louisa was entitled to sit at the head of the table, except when Macdonald visited and she moved to one side. As the “tenant,” Louisa had the right to invite friends to visit, rather than merely joining gatherings arranged by the Williamsons. She also rented (again with Macdonald's financial aid) a portion of the garden, where she grew her own flowers and vegetables; Professor Williamson had his own vegetable plot
and charged the general household for any produce consumed by the group. The real hero of this arrangement was Margaret: she understood, as few chatelaines would do, Louisa's fierce determination not to become a kind of paying guest in her sister's house.

Margaret Macdonald. To everyone's surprise (not least to Macdonald, who missed her wedding), she suddenly married a Queen's University professor, James Williamson. They became the de facto parents of Hugh John.

James Williamson, dour and humourless, yet well liked by his students, other professors and Macdonald. (This photo, as well as the photos of Margaret and Louisa, is from Lady Macdonald's personal album.)

Nothing, though, could change the state of Macdonald's own marriage. There was one small ray of hope. In 1855, when the government moved from Quebec City to Toronto, the national capital for the next four years, Isabella decided to join him, and she made the journey from Kingston by train that October. They rented an apartment in a boarding house on Wellington Street, near the city's western outskirts. Hugh John, now five years old and living more often with his surrogate parents, Margaret and James Williamson, than with the invalid Isabella, was brought up to Toronto to join his father and mother.

By this time, Toronto had suddenly taken off as a community. New immigrants poured into the city, swelling its population to forty thousand. (Kingston's population, meanwhile, remained unchanged at five thousand.) Toronto's own manufacturing plants and the success of the farmers to the southwest brought it prosperity. Substantial buildings such as the St. Lawrence Hall, the Mechanics' Institute and St. James' Cathedral had been completed, while the University of Toronto was starting to grow. The city itself stretched in long blocks from the Don River to Bathurst Street and north all the way to Gerrard Street.

Louisa Macdonald. Difficult, fiercely independent, a lifelong spinster, but also Macdonald's favourite sister.

Yet, sadly, the three Macdonalds could not turn themselves into a real family. Most of the time, Isabella remained secluded in her darkened sickroom, constantly complaining about the light and the noise. Macdonald's reports to family members about her condition continued through the depressing cycle of “Isabella has been very, very ill,” then, hopefully, that “she is evidently on the mend,” then, mournfully, that she was “desperately ill all last week.” Only rarely could Isabella even leave her bed to play with her son. Hugh John was regularly sent off to stay at the homes of friends and relatives in the new city. The ever-optimistic Macdonald reported to his mother that in these houses “there are young people, well brought up, so that he has the advantage of a good companionship.” When back home again, Hugh John would play with his father. “He and I play Beggar My Neighbour,” Macdonald wrote, “and you can't fancy how delighted I am when he beats me.” In another letter to his mother, Macdonald made, perhaps intentionally, perhaps by accident, a most revealing comment about his son's reaction to the stress being imposed on him: when he asked Hugh John where he would prefer to live, in Toronto or in Kingston, the child replied, “I like Kingston best because my Grandmother lives there.” Effectively, the boy had told his father that he would be happier living away from his permanently sick mother.

That same stress, a compound of guilt, repressed anger and bleak hopelessness, applied no less to Macdonald. As attorney general, he often had to work late or go on trips, duties that gave him an excuse to absent himself from the gloomy apartment. One letter to his mother in January 1856 captures the magnitude of the strain between him and Isabella: “I get lots of invitations here. I was asked out for every day last week, but declined of course on account of Isa's illness. Next week, or rather this week, is the same thing. But I am obliged to refuse.”

In all his letters to his relatives, Macdonald seldom strayed beyond family matters into politics. The letter he wrote to his mother on March 17, 1856, contains a striking exception. After news about Isabella and Hugh John, Macdonald suddenly exploded into rage: “I am carrying on a war against that scoundrel George Brown and I will teach him a lesson that he never learnt before. I will prove him a most dishonest, dishonourable fellow.”

In all of Canada's political history there has never been a personal contest like that between Macdonald and Brown. No other two rivals were so clearly above the ordinary. They were at odds about the fundamentals of the country itself and about the nature and purposes of politics. Their personalities and styles were near opposites, except that each was combative, competitive and quick to anger. On one occasion they came close to blows in public, and for eight years they said not a word to each other, even though they crossed paths regularly in the legislature building. Yet it would be their joint partnership during the critical years of 1864 to 1866, teeth gritted and tempers tamped down, that would bring about Confederation.

Brown is the great might-have-been of nineteenth-century Canadian politics. He possessed the intellect, charisma and strength of character to match Macdonald's more subtle talents. The difference between them was, in the strictly political realm and in the famous formulation of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, that one of them was a hedgehog and the other a fox. Brown was Berlin's hedgehog: he was seized of one great idea—Representation by Population, the basic democratic principle that each person's vote should be equal. Macdonald, the fox, was at ease with a multiplicity
of ideas, some contradictory, as he constantly changed course and doubled back (including on himself), never accepting defeat as permanent or regarding victory as anything but temporary. Above all, Macdonald was almost infinitely adaptable: “The great reason I have always been able to beat Brown,” he wrote, “is that I have been able to look a little ahead while he could on no occasion forgo the temptation of a temporary triumph.”

Despite Brown's exceptional talents, Macdonald would forever dance ahead out of his reach. “A campaign,”
Globe
editor Sir John Willison remarked astutely in his
Reminiscences
, “is George Brown in the pulpit and John A. making merry with the unrepentant on the outskirts of the congregation.” (By an uncanny coincidence, almost exactly the same kind of contest between two out-of-the-ordinary political leaders was in progress in Britain at the time, where the rivals were William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Again, moralist contended with worldly-wise realist, professor of ethics with student of human nature, hedgehog with fox, and, least consequential of all, Liberal with Conservative. The transatlantic difference was that, in Canada, it would be Macdonald who trounced Brown, while in Britain the outcome in terms of longevity in office—the only measure that counts in politics—would be Gladstone over Disraeli.)

Brown was a formidable and attractive figure. His most obvious attribute was sheer physicality. Six foot two, large and immensely strong, he had flaming red hair and radiated energy: he ate fast, rode fast, took steps two at a time—and sometimes four. He was intellectually capacious and fearless. He immigrated to New York with his father to help him run a newspaper. In 1843 he came north to edit a Free Kirk paper. Soon after settling in Toronto, Brown leaped into publishing on his own. The first edition of the
Globe
appeared in 1844, the same year Macdonald was elected to the legislature. Its editorials were forceful and trench-
ant, its news up to the minute, and its pages were printed on the new, highly efficient Hoe rotary press.

Brown published the paper first as a semi-weekly, then a tri-weekly, and, in 1853, a daily. Its circulation soon topped an amazing twenty thousand, as the new railways extended its reach. It was easily the largest, most influential and most profitable newspaper in the country.

Intellectually and morally, his most attractive cause was the abolition of slavery. One of his speeches on the subject attracted praise from the great philosopher John Stuart Mill.
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As well, and far ahead of his time, he called for reforms in penitentiaries, urging that convicts be treated as human beings who might be capable of change. Although not a textbook democrat—no different from Macdonald, Brown opposed universal suffrage, fearing it would lead to American-style demagoguery—he staged Canada's first mass political convention.