John A (23 page)

Isabella's death made Macdonald a middle-aged widower—and therefore once again a bachelor. From now on, he lived in boarding houses or in apartments. Often he roomed with other legislature members and with his principal civil servant, Hewitt Bernard. Inevitably, he drank a great deal more than before, spending longer hours in the Smoking Room of the Legislative Assembly. From this point on it becomes more difficult to know what Macdonald actually meant when he reported to his sister Margaret, as in a March 1858 letter, “I was very unwell last week so as to be confined to bed for three days and was hardly able to crawl to the House.” Most likely he was afflicted with some combination of both illness and inebriation.

In some ways, Macdonald's personal life improved. He could go places when he wanted to, and no longer needed to feel guilty for having invented some excuse to avoid hurrying back to Isabella's side. His mother, Helen, continued to suffer strokes, yet she remained indomitable. She now lived with the Williamsons, but in her stubborn way she insisted on paying Macdonald rent, including a small sum for the use of the garden and yard and a share of the cost of the male servant. At the same time, Macdonald's law practice seemed to be in exceptionally good shape under his energetic young partner, Archibald Macdonnell.

Macdonald even managed to survive unscathed a near-death experience. In July 1859 he boarded the steamer
Ploughboy
for an excursion to Sault Ste. Marie. The ship's engine failed and the vessel began drifting towards the rocky coastline amid ever-rising wind and waves. Only when it was near shore did the anchors finally catch, after having dragged for close to twelve miles. “None of the party will be nearer to their graves until they are placed in them,” Macdonald wrote to Louisa, adding, “The people behaved well, the women heroically.”

Without Isabella and without Hugh John, Macdonald no longer had anything to distract him from “the long game.” From now on, his personal life provided him with so few emotional demands or outlets for affection that he was free to apply all his abundant energy and passion exclusively to politics.

 

THIRTEEN

Double Majority

Is it a decree of destiny that Mr. Macdonald shall be the everlasting Prime Minister? We must face issues.
The Colonist,
June 19, 1858

A
s the decade of the 1850s drew to its end, Macdonald was approaching a political peak. He had outmanoeuvred Brown over the “double shuffle” with all the ease of a feral cat toying with a mouse. The bloc of
bleu
members who followed faithfully behind Cartier assured him of a semi-permanent majority in the legislature. His Liberal-Conservative Party, while shaky in several places, hugged the vital centre of the political spectrum, with the Tories in its ranks lapsing into sullen silence. As the de facto premier since 1854 and as co-premier in title since 1856, he'd held that post longer than had anyone in the life of the United Province of Canada. He'd deployed his tactics of compromise and accommodation to dispose successfully of long-standing issues such as the Clergy Reserves, the seigneurial system and separate schools, and had managed to select a single capital for the nation. Encomiums about Macdonald that floated across the Atlantic from the upper reaches of the Colonial Office described
him as “a distinguished statesman” and “the principal man” in Canada. It's always easier, though, to stumble when standing on a peak than on flat ground.

The warning to Macdonald came from an inconsequential source. On June 29, 1858, a small newspaper, the
Colonist,
ran a startling editorial titled, “Whither Are We Drifting?” After citing examples of national drift, it asked, “Is it a decree of destiny that Mr. Macdonald shall be the everlasting Prime Minister? We must face issues. Worse can happen than a ministerial defeat.” What was truly startling was the fact that the
Colonist
was a pro-Conservative newspaper—and that it was on to something. A disconnection had opened up between the governed and the governing; a disconnection, that is, between reality and politics.

Early in 1858, a letter proposing an extravagant idea crossed Macdonald's desk. In it, Walter R. Jones of Kingston suggested that the government should encourage the formation of a company to build a railway “through British American territory to the Pacific.” The next step should be “a line of steamers from Vancouver Island to China, India, and Australia.” Although the historical record contains nothing more about Jones, his letter catches perfectly the spirit of the times.

The years from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s were either the best that Canadians experienced throughout the entire nineteenth century or a close second-best.
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Everything was booming. The economy was benefiting triply: from the Reciprocity Treaty
(a free trade deal) with the United States, a general upturn in world trade, and the special demands created in Britain by the Crimean War and the closing of the rival lumber trade from the Baltic. Immigration was booming, at the same time as outmigration to the United States had slowed substantially. Towns such as Toronto and Quebec were acquiring some of the characteristics of cities, while Montreal, with close to one hundred thousand inhabitants, was not that far behind Boston. Promising new manufacturing towns were taking shape, including Hamilton and Brantford; London, in just the last half decade of the fifties, tripled its population to fifteen thousand.

The word “progress” was on almost everyone's lips. In
The Shield of Achilles,
edited by W.L. Morton, the historian Laurence S. Fall is notes that there was “an almost total absence of a literature of pessimism in the Province of Canada.” Optimism was generated by the abundance of jobs and by rising wages. By no coincidence, a great many of the country's finest and boldest buildings, most spectacularly the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, but also churches, cathedrals and public halls such as Toronto's St. Lawrence Hall, date from this period. One other agent of change affecting Canada more decisively than any other country in the world was the steam engine, and the parallel lines of steel that stretched out beyond the horizon.

Initially, Canadians went timidly into the Age of Railways. In 1844, a decade and a half after George Stephenson's famous Rocket made its first run in England, there were just fifty miles of track in the entire country. Then Canadians embraced the new age of transportation totally and extravagantly: by 1854 there were eight hundred miles of track; by 1864 there would be more than three thousand, including the Grand Trunk, reputedly the longest line in the world, stretching all the way from Quebec City to Sarnia. Soon, there were lines all over the place, built by the
Great Western, the Northern Railway, and the St. Lawrence and Atlantic. In fact, almost all these companies lost money and had to be subsidized by government. Often the railways disappointed; their underpowered locomotives repeatedly broke down and could be halted by even minor snowdrifts.

Poster for the Grand Trunk Railway, the longest railway in the world. The illustration shows the tubular iron Victoria Bridge, which spanned the St. Lawrence River. It was completed in 1859 and, the next year, was opened officially by the visiting Prince of Wales. Both railway and bridge reflected the emerging expansionist and confident Canada.

Railways were by no means the only catalyst of change. Canada's Pioneer Age was beginning to pass. The last parcel of “wild land” in the Bruce Peninsula was sold in 1854; the first “macadamized” roads were being built; and a few towns even boasted street lights. In some homes, parlour organs broadened the means of entertainment beyond fiddles and squeeze boxes. People had begun to realize that each new mechanical advance was not a fluke but the product of a system that would forever produce more and more marvels, from the mechanical harvester and the sewing machine to the telegraph. Many of these inventions brought further radical changes, such as the division of labour and the elimination of distance. During this period, no change would be more transformational than the publication in 1859 of a massive, near-unreadable tome—Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Decades would pass before the
melancholy, long withdrawing roar”
^*74
of the loss of faith would reach Canada, but a defensive response came early when the curriculum of the required courses at the University of Toronto was altered to incorporate natural theology and “evidences” of the validity of Christianity.

One Canadian sage compared the transformational effect of the railways to that of the invention of printing. They made a huge difference, although the small-engined locomotives had a hard time pushing through the snow on the Grand Trunk rails.

Nothing, though, changed Canada more than did the railways. In 1849 the Montreal engineer Thomas Coltrin Keefer, a kind of nineteenth-century Marshall McLuhan, published a pamphlet,
Philosophy of Railroads,
in which he proclaimed, “Steam has exerted an influence over matter which can only be compared with that which the discovery of Printing has exercised upon the mind.” A century later, the historian Michael Bliss revisited this idea in his book
Northern Enterprise:
“Steam conquered space and time. It
seemed to liberate communities from the tyrannies of geography and climate…. Steam changed the land itself, for wherever the rails went, they gave the land value.” From now on, Canadians were less and less immured in their villages and small towns. They could reach out to each other to exchange everything from goods to ideas. Newspapers—the Toronto
Globe
most particularly—ceased to be purely local; business, from nail-makers to insurance companies, began to operate on a province-wide basis. Goods became more diverse and more competitive, and food became fresher and more varied. Mrs. Beeton's monumental cookery book became available in 1860. Time became standardized—by Sandford Fleming. In short, Canadians began to become a single community.

This was the environment, optimistic and expansive and ever more agreeable, in which a great many Canadians lived during the last years of the 1850s and the first of the 1860s. Keefer proclaimed, “Ignorance and prejudice will flee before advancing prosperity.” The magazine
Canadian Gem and Family Visitor
told its readers: “Canada is destined to become one the finest countries on the face of the globe.” The geologist and surveyor of the west, Henry Youle Hind, in his book
Eighty Years Progress of British North America
predicted “a magnificent future…which shall place the province, with the days of many now living, on a level with Great Britain herself, in population, in wealth, and in power.” That the nineteenth century would belong to Canada seemed obvious; the politicians, though, were talking quite differently.

The changing circumstances did effect political change. Railways gave politicians a whole new range of power: they could decide who would win a charter to build and operate a company, and where its line should go. It could also give them personal
profits—Premier MacNab as president of the Great Western; Cartier as solicitor for the Grand Trunk; and Hincks, the ex-premier, as a major shareholder in the same company. A British lobbyist for the Grand Trunk remarked, “Upon my word, I do not think that there is much to be said for Canadians over Turks when contracts, places, free tickets on railways or even cash was in question.” Put simply, there was now incomparably more money than ever before rattling around inside the Canadian political system. Keefer described the period as “the saturnalia of nearly all classes connected with railways.” Surprisingly, Macdonald himself never seems to have benefited personally from this first railway boom, and the only shares he appears to have bought were a modest number in the Great Southern Railway. But Canadian politics had undergone a sea change from its glory days of fighting for Responsible Government.