John A (35 page)

Having identified the problem—Canada's weakness might motivate England to pull back from North America—Macdonald then presented his solution: “We must, therefore, become important, not only to England but in the eyes of foreign states. And most especially to the United States…. For the sake of securing peace to ourselves and our posterity, we must make ourselves powerful. The great security for peace is to convince the world of our strength by being united.”

Macdonald was using these passages in his speech to appeal to Canadians to send out a clear, collective signal of their will to survive. Doing this—by Confederation—would give a message that would be noticed and respected in the two places that mattered to Canada—London and Washington.

What Macdonald was telling the delegates in Quebec City was, as most of them must have recognized, the truth itself, harsh and unvarnished. U.S. power was the new continental reality. Britain could still help and would continue to do so, but increasingly from
a distance. Ultimately, Canada was on its own. Either it made a convulsive effort to survive or it just might vanish.

When and how Macdonald underwent such a eureka moment has to remain a mystery—indeed, no proof exists that he ever experienced it. He left no writing describing it; no colleague ever claimed later to have been there when he blurted out, “Now I see!” Intellectual epiphanies were not, anyway, his style; Macdonald favoured action, not angst. And to him action included the seeming inaction of waiting for the exact moment when all the stars were aligned. That Macdonald eventually committed himself to Confederation at about five minutes to midnight doesn't mean that he had not recognized its necessity a good deal earlier. What mattered is that, once he had intuited that the moment was ripe, Macdonald hurled himself into action, never again glancing back. We were made, this is to say, by a man who, once he knew what do to, knew how to get it done.

Other commentators have argued for different interpretations of the sequence of events. To some, Donald Creighton above all, Macdonald moved stealthily towards Confederation for years before he committed himself to it publicly. The predominant view is that he took up Confederation's cause only when he realized that unless he joined the project he would put at risk his own and his party's future. That interpretation is, of course, far from being wholly wrong. But it amounts to a one-dimensional analysis of a leader with a multilayered mind—something akin to treating as the complete Lincoln the very limited leader that Lincoln amounted to at the start of the American Civil War.

That speech by Macdonald at Quebec City was the first time Canada's politicians had been told the truth about the “double” threat that Canada faced from across the Atlantic and from across the border. It's uncertain how many of his contemporaries understood what Macdonald was attempting to do. Galt did, as a later letter of his will show. And so did Goldwin Smith, who at the
time wrote that the only way to defend Canada was “to fence her round with the majesty of an independent nation.” What was happening, though, was that the Confederation stakes were being transformed from merely those of finding a way to end a political deadlock to that of finding a way for Canada to survive.

That Britain might, if not actually abandon Canada, then gently but firmly pull itself back from a close embrace in order to position itself nearer to the United States, challenges the generally presented view of Canada as the nineteenth-century linchpin of the British Empire. After all, without Canada, the Empire would no longer stretch around the world in an unbroken chain on which the sun never set. At the time, though, such a gap would not have mattered that much—simply because the Empire did not matter that much to the British themselves.

The British Empire of the mid-1860s was not at all the Empire of bugles and banners and thin red lines that has been handed down in the history books. These flummeries existed then, but the Empire itself did not really exist. It did physically, of course. Britain was the global hegemon: it accounted for one-third of the world's industrial output; its Royal Navy policed the seas; and London was easily the world's largest and richest city. Moreover, the British Empire possessed the aura of having defeated Napoleon (a glory now fading fast) and the moral aura of having deployed the Royal Navy to sweep slavery from the high seas.
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But it didn't exist psychically. Rather than an empire, what Britain owned then was an agglomeration of territories acquired or conquered or bought or swapped or stolen “in a fit of absence of mind,” to use the famous phrase.
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The British Empire, in the term's ordinary meaning—the one it took Canada until the Statute of Westminster of 1931 to gain full independence from—didn't come into being until the 1870s. Its birth is commonly dated to Disraeli's purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, although a better date might be 1872, when Disraeli turned imperialism into Britain's political litmus test—and not coincidentally won power for himself—by attacking the Liberals, and his arch-rival Gladstone, for seeking “the disintegration of the Empire of England.”
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Before this time, the British were quite uncertain whether they wanted to have an empire. The country was divided between “Big Englanders” like Disraeli and “Little Englanders,” who reckoned that any empire imposed far greater costs on Britain than benefits. Intellectually, the Little Englanders made all the running; they won a key argument over free trade in the 1840s, after which Britain's trade no longer followed the flag but chased after profits anywhere. Disraeli himself spoke at times in the tones of a Little Englander; in 1852 he described the colonies
as “a millstone around our necks.” As late as 1866 he reasoned from the emergence of a united Germany and a rising Russia that “power and influence we should exercise in Asia, consequently in Eastern Europe, consequently in Western Europe; but what is the use of these colonial deadweights
which we do not govern?
”(The peak of the Little Englanders came in 1868–72, when such views were held not just by Gladstone, then the prime minister, but also by his chancellor of the Exchequer, the foreign secretary and the colonial secretary.)

Little Englanders made the economic case—men including Manchester School Liberals such as Richard Cobden,
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John Bright and Goldwin Smith. The press fired more shots, as in the
Edinburgh Review
's description of the North American colonies as “productive of heavy expense to Great Britain, and of nothing else.” Such opinions were common among the most knowledgeable Britons of all—those in the Colonial Office. In 1864 John Taylor, one of the influential officials there, dismissed all the British North American colonies as “a sort of
damnosa hereditas.
” Taylor and the top official, Sir Frederic Rogers, were “separatists” who believed that the best solution was to gently nudge the colonies towards independence.

Those who wanted the Empire retained evoked glory and honour. Prime ministers in particular held this view: Lord Melbourne proclaimed that “the final separation of these colonies might possibly not be of material detriment…. But it is clear it would be a serious blow to the honour of Great Britain” Sir Robert Peel's
view, specifically about “the Canadas,” was that “the tenure by which we hold [them] is most precarious, & that sooner or later we must lose them” Lord John Russell warned that “the loss of a great portion of our Colonies would disrupt our imperial interests in the world, and the vultures would soon be getting together” and Lord Palmerston felt that “it would lower us greatly, for ‘if reputation is strength' then the reverse would weaken us much.” Until Disraeli won the day, the Big Englanders' case was defensive: while no particular colony might be worth keeping, a domino effect might precipitate the loss of all the rest. (The real concern of those who wanted to keep the colonies was that if Canada went, so, sooner or later, would Ireland.)

It was only
after
Confederation that the British really embraced their empire, and so embraced Canada. During the earlier years, Macdonald had no assurance that his own loyalty and that of other Canadians would be reciprocated. Indeed, it was during this period of uncertainty that he made some of his sharpest comments about Canada-British relations: he pronounced that Canada had the right “to raise revenue in [its] own fashion,” that is, to impose whatever tariffs it saw fit on British goods; he protested strongly to the governor general, as “a matter of the gravest importance…directly affecting the independence of our Courts and of our people” and as “an unseemly and irritating conflict of jurisdiction,” the decision of a British court to issue a writ of habeas corpus to protect an accused person in Canada.
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Macdonald praised the action itself as done for “praise-worthy motives” but insisted that “the English Courts of Justice
shall have no jurisdiction in Canada, and that no writ or process from them shall run into it.”

The possibility of a split should not be exaggerated. The British aristocracy and political class always supported the Empire—it created jobs for those troublesome younger sons. Some did so for high-minded reasons: Edward Cardwell, the colonial secretary, argued in a January 1865 speech at Oxford University that while “lynx-eyed logicians” might dismiss the colonies, in contrast to other empires that had clung on to their holdings, “it has been given to England alone to be also the mother of great and free communities.”
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There was also the powerful emotional argument that imperialism's real purpose was to create converts to Christianity; prime ministers always wanted to keep the colonies, because none of them wanted to go down in the history books as the leader who had “lost” them. And at no time did anyone ever suggest giving up India, that jewel in Britain's crown, or naval bases such as Gibraltar and Malta—or Halifax.

Support for keeping all the other colonies, though, remained suspect until the 1870s—particularly Canada, because with it came the risk of a clash with the United States. The Colonial Office itself was a second-rank portfolio and remained so until almost the end of the century.
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Its staff was tiny; its offices—at 14 Downing Street—were crumbling and so damp that fires had to be kept going all year round to prevent the files from going mouldy. Colonial Office clerks passed their time playing darts with pen-nibs attached to literal red tape.

Among the colonies, Canada, while the richest and most advanced politically, attracted little sentiment. “Who is Minister, at Quebec City or any other seat of British government in America, we none of us know,” observed the
Times.
“If we knew today, we should forget tomorrow.” New Brunswick's lieutenant-governor, Arthur Gordon, described Canada as “a last resort for people who have ruined themselves at home.” According to the
Times,
Canada came second to Australia, because those going there came from “a wealthier and more completely English class”—by which it meant that, blessedly, few Irish went to Australia. Outside politics, Canada could count on few friendly voices or pens: the novelist Anthony Trollope had his eponymous hero Phineas Finn declare, “Not one man in a thousand cares whether the Canadas prosper or fail to prosper.”
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Mind you, a number of Canadians—Macdonald conspicuously absent from their ranks—felt the same, in reverse. A legislature member, Philip VanKoughnet, wrote home from London that he “felt himself like a cat in a strange garret.” George Brown, while in England on the trip during which he met Anne, wrote home that “after all I have seen, I say now as earnestly as I can—Canada for me!” Still, there was that crushing, dismissive judgmet of the authoritative Times that whether Canadians opted for independence or not was hardly “considered a matter of great moment to England.”

From this conflicting raw material, Macdonald had to forge a counterweight to the colossus next door. Two comments capture the outer limits of the possibilities available to him. One was by the colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle. The other was by an unknown editor of a backcountry weekly. While in
Washington at the end of 1860, following the Prince of Wales' North American tour, Newcastle sought out the future secretary of state, William Seward. They talked about the possibility that Canada, just by being there, might accidentally precipitate a Britain-U.S. conflict. Seward said he couldn't believe Britain would risk so much for so little. “Do not remain under such an error,” answered Newcastle. “Once touch us on our honour, and you will soon find the bricks of New York and Boston falling about your heads”
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—in other words, the Royal Navy would use the Atlantic ports of the United States for target practice. The other comment was contained in a small Lower Canada newspaper,
Le Défricheur,
in an editorial about whether, as Macdonald and many others claimed, a confederation of the British North American colonies would actually improve Canada's military security. Such dependence on a piece of paper, wrote the young editor, would be like being “armed with an eggshell to stop a bullet.” The editor's name was Wilfrid Laurier.