John A (2 page)

 

ONE

Lairds Ourselves

Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man. Helen Macdonald's judgment on her eldest son

W
here John A. Macdonald was born and when he was born are unknown. Or, rather, are not known exactly. About the essentials of his beginnings, there are no doubts whatever. He was born in the Scottish industrial city of Glasgow in 1815.

There were historical dimensions to both place and date. Glasgow was the lustiest child of Britain's Industrial Revolution: a sleepy town of only twenty thousand in 1791, its shipyards along the Clyde, its engineering works and factories and its “dark Satanic mills” had sent the town's population soaring above one hundred thousand by the time of Macdonald's birth, less than a quarter-century later. As well, 1815 was the year of the Battle of Waterloo. That cataclysmic military clash didn't so much ensure Napoleon's defeat (which was inevitable eventually, anyway) as ensure that Britain, its strength multiplied by its long industrial lead over all its rivals, would become the global powerhouse of the nineteenth century. By pure happenstance, Britain's global
reach created a possibility that its leftover colonies in North America, strung across the top half of the continent like widely spaced and oddly sized beads, and having little in common other than their mutual Britishness (for the most part), might yet—just—remain independent from their overwhelming neighbour, the coming hegemon of the twentieth century. For that to actually happen, however, required the arrival of a leader who could cajole and bluff and bully these colonies into becoming a whole larger than the sum of their parts. In 1815, little of this was of the slightest interest to anyone in the British Isles. Yet it was in Glasgow in that year that Canada's future began to take shape.

The minutiae of Macdonald's birth need to be cleared up. Throughout his life and for the near century and a quarter that has followed his death, his birthdate has been commemorated as January 11, 1815—as in the joyous celebratory dinner staged each year in Kingston, Ontario, for example, and in the inscriptions on all the plaques and statues that honour him. But this particular day may be a mistake. The January 11 date is taken from the entry for his birth made by his father, Hugh Macdonald, in his memorandum book. The entry recorded in the General Register Office in Edinburgh, though, is January 10.
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Similarly, precision about where specifically Macdonald was born, while a matter of lesser consequence, is as difficult to determine. The delivery may have taken place at 29 Ingram Street in Glasgow or, not far away, at 18 Brunswick Street, both on the south side of the Clyde River, because the family moved between these locations around the time of his birth. To pick at a last
unknowable nit, Macdonald's father recorded the moment of birth as 4:15, without specifying afternoon or early morning.

The other defining attributes of Macdonald's birth are known beyond argument. His parents were middle class, if precariously so. They were Scots, and so of course was he. And soon after his birth, they chose to immigrate to Canada rather than take the advice of Samuel Johnson about the most attractive prospect that any Scotsman could ever come upon and follow the usual road to London.

Immigration always happens for one of two reasons or for both simultaneously: either individuals or families are pushed out from their homeland by poverty, oppression, failure or plain bad luck, or they are pulled towards a new country by the tantalizing promise it holds for new beginnings and new opportunities. Both factors applied to the Macdonalds, but in distinctive ways, when they set out across the Atlantic in 1820. John A. himself was then five years old. An early biographer described him as having “a bright eye, a lively manner and a head of curly brown hair which darkened into black as he grew up.” At least supposedly, he showed early promise of having the gift of the gab, once giving a speech to a gathering of relatives by mounting a table, from which, as his gestures became ever more dramatic, he projected himself to the ground.

As soon as the Napoleonic wars ended, England was gripped by a depression that cut most deeply into its farming counties; the same outwards push existed in Scotland, given force there by the clearances of people from the land to make way for sheep—as often, despite later myth, by Scottish landowners as by English ones. The great migration from the British Isles to both Canada and the United States dates from this period, although it
remained relatively small until the 1830 s, later multiplying exponentially through the 1840 s as the Irish fled from the horrors of their Great Famine. To magnify the force of the outwards push, the British governments of the day accepted the thesis of Thomas Malthus that population growth would always outpace the growth in food production. To avoid social unrest, perhaps even the ultimate horror of a revolution of the kind from which Napoleon had sprung, successive governments encouraged the “idle poor” to move elsewhere.

The Macdonalds, though, were not a family of farmers. And although hard up, they weren't poor, not in the sense of their being malnourished and in rags. The force that pushed them out was failure—quite unnecessary failure, and the product almost entirely of the fecklessness of Macdonald's father, Hugh.

Before Hugh Macdonald is introduced, it's necessary to go backwards one further genealogical step to Hugh's own father, John Macdonald. Although he never left Scotland, John Macdonald set the family on its transatlantic journey. When he came down from the Highlands—pushed out by the clearances implemented by his laird, the Duke of Sutherland—he went first to a little village in the Strathfleet Valley and then on to the Sutherlandshire town of Dornoch, where he set up as a shopkeeper. John Macdonald was widely liked—a contemporary described him as having “a tender nature, full of humour, a quick and winning manner, with a bow and smile for everyone he met.” Many of those qualities would pass to his grandson, as did his longevity, for he died at the age of eighty-six. John Macdonald's most distinctive legacy to his grandson was his head of abundant but curiously crinkly hair. His most important legacy to his heirs, though, was to get them out of the beautiful but bleak Highlands into a settled community, and to raise them there to at least the lower rungs of the middle class.

Hugh Macdonald squandered the greater part of what had been
handed down to him. Born in Dornoch,
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he moved in early adulthood to the growing city of Glasgow and there owned and operated a succession of small enterprises—one, for instance, making bandanas. Their common characteristic was that they all failed. Hugh was known as a decent, amiable man, good in conversation and impossible to dislike. This quality served him well: after one bankruptcy, when he was at serious risk of being sent to a debtors' prison, he was allowed not only to remain free but to keep his library and household effects, later selling them to pay for the tickets for his transatlantic passage. Two attributes that Hugh passed on to his son were that he had a hot, Celtic temper, and that he drank a lot.

Hugh Macdonald's most considerable accomplishment during his relatively short life was to marry Helen Shaw. It happened in 1811, when she was at the relatively advanced age of thirty-four and he at the comparatively tender one of twenty-eight. Helen was an exceptional woman, the rock upon which the small tribe took its stand facing outwards to the world, arms linked. She kept the family going through thin and thick. A surviving portrait of her, done in at least middle age, depicts accurately her rock-like qualities of strength and determination. “She was a little above the medium height, large limbed, and capable of much endurance,” commented the contemporary biographer E.B. Biggar.
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read widely, and as Biggar wrote, “had she possessed the advantages of a high education, and the opportunities some get in life, she would have been a noted woman.”

Helen Macdonald. She was determined that her son would make his mark in life.

While the portrait of Helen Macdonald suggests the depth and liveliness of her eyes, it betrays little hint of the most attractive of her qualities—her capacity for gaiety. She and John A. loved to trade stories and jokes, his being the racier. Biggar commented, “She appreciated a droll saying or a droll situation.” Once, when Macdonald ascended to the social height of being elected president of Kingston's St. Andrew's Society, he led a gathering preceded by a piper to her house; when she heard the wail of the bagpipe, Helen came downstairs and danced a jig in the street.

She was wholly Scots, and above all a Highlander. Her preferred language was Gaelic. Her father fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, and afterwards, as did many Scots, joined the British Army. She could be stonily stubborn, a quality that repeatedly taxed Macdonald's talents once he became the de facto head of the family. She possessed an exceptional memory—a gift she passed on to her son—and functioned as the family historian and the teller of Highland tales.

Of her children—two boys and two girls at the time of leaving Glasgow—there was never any doubt that her favourite was her elder son, John Alexander. “Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man,” she said on many occasions.