John A (49 page)

A new problem had arisen. On July 30 Étienne-Paschal Taché died, sending Macdonald his last poignant note: “J'aimerais à vous voir encore une fois avant le long voyage que je vais bientôt
entreprendre.” The day after Taché's funeral, Monck asked Macdonald, as the most senior of the quartet, to head the ministry. Brown, when called in to see Monck, would have none of it; while denying he had any “personal aspirations whatever,” he pointed out that his own Reformers were twice as numerous as Macdonald's Conservatives. He and Macdonald then met one on one. They reached no meeting of minds, despite an offer by Macdonald to step down for Cartier. Given that those two were joined politically at the hip, Brown naturally rejected it. Eventually they reached a compromise: the new premier would be an anonymous, long-serving Canadien, Sir Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau. He was sworn in on August 7.

Then came another complication. Brown, always quick to identify a slight, had already complained that Macdonald had given Galt public precedence over him. He also harboured suspicions—justified, no doubt—that Macdonald and Cartier were dispensing patronage that ought to have been his to allocate. From that point on, Brown refused to speak to Macdonald, dealing only with Cartier.

The malaise continued. A mid-summer government statement on Confederation made to the legislature in August had nothing new to say. Macdonald himself was often absent, supposedly on doctor's orders, but in fact because he was drinking heavily.

Yet while Macdonald was drinking far too much at the worst possible time, his antennae remained as alert as ever. In July a large conference was held in Detroit, organized by the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, to discuss and if possible reverse Washington's decision to end the Reciprocity Treaty with Canada in the spring of 1866. No fewer than five hundred American businessmen attended, as well as fifty Canadians, all worried deeply by the impending loss of cross-border trade.
During the meeting the American consul general in Montreal, J.R. Potter, chose to declare in his speech that the entire problem could be resolved by the United States annexing Canada. News of this extraordinary behaviour by the principal representative of the U.S. Government in Canada took time to reach Ottawa. Macdonald invented an occasion for himself to deliver a speech in Ottawa (press releases didn't exist then), and on September 28 gave his reply in a way that revealed a great deal about his personal feelings on Canada's future in North America. First he talked about Confederation, actually a bit optimistically: “The union of all the Provinces is a fixed fact.” Then he talked about himself: “The mere struggle for office and fight for position—the difference between the ‘outs' and ‘ins' have no charms for me,” he said, “but now I have something worth fighting for—and that is the junction of Her Majesty's subjects in all British North America as one great nation.” Macdonald knew fully what his own leitmotif was.

As fully, Macdonald now knew precisely what he was doing for himself. The month before, in a letter to Monck on June 26, 1866, he described Confederation as “an event which will make us historical.” He then added, almost as if warning Brown to stay out of his way, “—not with my will would another person take my position in completing the scheme for which I have worked so earnestly.”

As was now inevitable, relations between Macdonald and Brown went from bad to worse. In November, Brown took umbrage at Galt's having been sent alone to Washington to try (unsuccessfully) to negotiate an extension of the Reciprocity Treaty. Macdonald got Galt to explain that his mission had been unoffi
cial and that, on a second trip, a Reform minister would accompany him.

A parting could no longer be prevented. On December 17 Brown sent in his resignation. Afterwards, he wrote to Anne, “Thank Providence—I am a free man once more.” Macdonald got Galt “
without fail
to prepare at once” an account of what had happened between him and Brown so he could show it to the other Reform ministers, in the hope that he could convince them to stay rather than leave with Brown. The tactic worked: there were no other defections from the Great Coalition, and a third Reformer took Brown's place in the government.

The long, intensely personal duel between Brown and Macdonald had reached its end. The clash of personalities made their parting inevitable, as did the fact that their objectives were fundamentally at odds. Brown wanted a “mini-federation” within just the United Province of Canada, to separate the French and the English. He had exulted at the end of the Quebec Conference that French-Canadianism had been extinguished and was delighted when he heard in the spring of 1865 that New Brunswick's pro-Confederation government had been defeated in the election. This result, he wrote to Anne, “is a very serious matter for the Maritime provinces, but magnificent for us.” Macdonald's purpose, by contrast, was a transcontinental nation, with Confederation as its essential first building block, one based on a pact of trust between French and English. Brown's last comments about Confederation before it actually happened, during a debate in the legislature in the summer of 1866, showed how distant he was from Macdonald. There, Brown condemned as “a most inconvenient and inexpedient device” any attempt to use the constitution “to bind down a majority…to protect a minority” rather, he argued, the majority should be left free “to act according to their sense of what is right and just.”

Nevertheless, Brown fully deserved McGee's encomium to him for having displayed “moral courage” in bringing his followers with him into the Great Coalition government that would bring about Confederation. While many of his political views were narrow, Brown was an exceptional public figure. There was even an expansiveness to his later explanation for quitting: “I want to be free to write of men and things without control…. Party leadership and the conducting of a great journal do not harmonize.” Most certainly he deserved from Macdonald a great deal more than the crabbed, ungracious compliment he later paid him: “[Brown] deserves the credit of joining with me; he and his party gave me that assistance in Parliament that enabled us to carry confederation.”

From this point on, the tide began to turn decisively. Through the winter, New Brunswick's Premier Smith and his government progressively lost their way. By the spring of 1866 he had been pushed back so far onto the defensive that the Throne Speech actually contained a description of Confederation as “an object much to be desired.” Not long afterwards, his government was defeated in the House and an election called. At that instant, there appeared exactly the political reinforcements that Macdonald most needed: the Fenians appeared on New Brunswick's borders.

In fact, Canada-U.S. relations had improved considerably by this time, if for the worst of all possible reasons. The previous April, just one week after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, President Lincoln had been assassinated while attending a play at
Ford's Theater in Washington. Unanimously, Canadian politicians and the press recognized that a giant had been struck down, and they mourned the loss to the United States as well as to the world. The day after, the Toronto
Globe
appeared with its front page bordered in black; Toronto sent two municipal representatives to attend the funeral, and during the two hours that the service was being held, church bells throughout the country pealed unceasingly while ships in the ports of British North America lowered their flags to half-mast. The most moving and the most deeply grieving services for Lincoln were those held in the small wooden churches of Canadian blacks.

At the same time, the rapid demobilization of the North's armies provided relief from the threat of a possible invasion. Just one lingering cause for alarm remained: demobbed soldiers had been allowed to buy back their rifles for six dollars; noticeably, many of those doing so had been Irish Americans. Macdonald was kept well briefed about the Fenians' doings by his intelligence chief, Gilbert McMicken. At least as much, he was kept well briefed by the Fenians themselves. They were talkative, boastful, combative (with each other) and, while brave soldiers individually, hopeless as an organized force. They did have one good marching song: “Many battles have been won / Along with the boys in blue / And we'll go and capture Canada / For we've nothing else to do.”

As St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1866, approached, nervousness mounted in Canada. Some ten thousand militia men were mobilized. Nothing happened. Then on April 7, the streets of the Maine seaport of Portland were suddenly crowded with Irishmen, most carrying revolvers and with long knives in their belts; they went on to the town of Eastport to hold a “convention.” Their objective was the island of Campobello, New Brunswick. Two British warships hastily sailed from Halifax, followed by two troopships from Malta. Soon there was a mini Royal Navy fleet off the Maine coast,
together with some five thousand British and New Brunswick militia soldiers. The Fenians straggled out of Eastport, leaving behind unpaid hotel bills and around fifteen hundred rifles. Actual action was limited to one boatload of Fenians who made it to an offshore Canadian island and burned down a customs warehouse.

That the Fenian raid had been a fiasco didn't change its consequences but only multiplied them. Canada had been threatened. Britain had fulfilled its obligation to rush to its aid. Most disturbingly, American authorities had allowed the invasion to be attempted from its territory (no Fenian was ever charged afterwards for violating the neutrality laws). Everything that had happened reinforced the argument that Confederation was essential to national security.
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Governor General Monck sent home the word that the militia's performance had ended forever the accusation so often hurled at the North American colonies of “helplessness, inertness and dependence.” Indeed, the Fenian expedition had been so counterproductive that some people speculated that Macdonald had stage-managed the entire affair with McGee's help.
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Not a scrap of evidence suggests that was so. There was, though, something ominous. One of McMicken's detectives reported he had been told that “one thousand dollars is offered in gold to anyone that will bring in D'Arcy McGee's head.”

For the time being, Macdonald could not have asked for more than he already had. In Nova Scotia, Tupper was able finally to get the Legislative Assembly to approve a pro-Confederation resolution, which cleverly asked not for approval of Confederation but only for
Nova Scotia delegates to take part in negotiations that could “effectually assure just provision for the rights and interests of Nova Scotia.”
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A month later, Tilley won the New Brunswick election, winning even more decisively—33 seats to 8—than had his anti-Confederate opponent the previous year. One factor was the support of the Roman Catholic bishops. But money talked even more loudly than did the faith. In June Tilley had written to Macdonald, “Telegraph me in cipher saying what we can rely on…. It will require some $40,000 or $50,000 to do the work in all our counties.” A few days later, he wrote again, even more urgently, “To be frank with you, the election in this Province can be made certain if the
means
are used.” He suggested that the exchange of cash be made outside the province, in Portland, Maine. Monck then got into the act, telegraphing Macdonald: “I think it is very desirable that he [Galt] should undertake the journey to Portland.” In counterpoint, Galt wrote to Macdonald, saying, “That
means
had better be used—I think we
must
put it through,” adding that he would go to Portland together with Brydges in order to meet with Tilley and consummate the exchange. The use of the “means” did achieve its end. This exercise, undertaken for the higher cause of Confederation and one fully approved by a governor general of the highest probity, introduced Macdonald to the art of extracting election campaign funds from a large railway company.
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