The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ private prosecution to challenge the legality of the double shuffle. Macdonald faced massive fines if he lost the case. In fact he won, but the action was launched in the name of a man who was bankrupt, so he could not recover his costs. The Globe alleged that the thought of losing Macdonald created panic among “the hungry, unprincipled crew who call him leader.” But was he really indispensable? In July 1859, Macdonald discovered that Galt and Cartier had authorized a major bank guarantee without telling him. Angry that he had “not been consulted,” he drafted a resignation letter. Maybe he never sent it: the risk of acceptance was too great. In fact, Macdonald was probably not consulted because he had been adrift on a steamboat in Georgian Bay. He had joined an inspection tour — a political junket — sailing to Sault Ste. Marie, but the ship’s engines had failed and the helpless vessel drifted dangerously close to the rocky Bruce Peninsula. Even George Brown was shocked at how close Canada’s political elite had come to perishing. “Little as I owe them, I would not like them to go off in that way.” John A. Macdonald did not travel west again until 1886, when he rode the train to the Pacific.

      Although there were further threats to quit in 1861 and 1862, Macdonald was remarkably tenacious in office. His “private affairs” were in such disarray that in November 1858, he appealed to an associate to be “a good fellow” and help him out of a “scrape” by hurrying a payment owed to him. John A. Macdonald picked his business associates badly. In August 1859, he arrived in Kingston to find his property seized for auction thanks to the default of a hard-up colleague whose finances he had recklessly underwritten. “I am quite unable to pay my own debts & meet this one of yours as well.” One observer wondered how “a man of so much intellect and versatility” could be “such a child” about money. A partner in a Kingston real estate development complained in 1861, “Macdonald has all but ruined me by his wretched carelessness.” Yet, despite his resolve in July 1862 to “set to work to make a little money,” Macdonald remained addicted to politics.

      Isabella’s death had left him with sole responsibility for his son Hugh John. The Macdonald of the 1840s had delighted in playing with a young nephew, pretending to owe the little boy huge sums of money and emptying his pockets of coin to pay the imaginary debt. But the most popular politician in Canada now seemed too busy and remote to be a proper father to “Hughey.” Parenting responsibilities fell upon his sister Margaret, who had married a Queen’s academic, widower James Williamson. The childless Williamsons were “kind & judicious” in rearing the boy, and Macdonald’s letters sent praise and kisses, but somehow his staccato correspondence conveyed little affection for Hugh and not overmuch appreciation for the help of his in-laws. Hugh Macdonald became an insecure adult.

      Meanwhile, Macdonald’s political career descended towards disaster. In 1860 Queen Victoria sent her son, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), on the first royal tour of Canada, under the guardianship of the Duke of Newcastle, the British Cabinet minister responsible for the colonies. Kingston was their first Upper Canadian port of call, and Macdonald planned a glittering ball at which his constituents could meet the prince. He was not alone in planning a welcome. Catholic priests had been prominent in civic ceremonies in French Canada, and Kingston’s Orangemen determined to parade in their regalia under triumphal arches to demonstrate that Canada was a Protestant country too. Unfortunately, the Orange Order was banned in Ireland and the duke refused to countenance its existence. When the royal steamboat arrived at Kingston, a furious row broke out, with Macdonald insisting that the Order was a legal body in Canada, Newcastle refusing to allow the prince to land, and the Orangemen standing their ground on the waterfront. The gala ball was a flop, despite Macdonald’s bogus claim that “His Royal Highness had expressed his sincere regret at the unfortunate misunderstanding.” After a twenty-four-hour standoff, the prince sailed away. Macdonald had furiously told the duke that “if they passed Kingston by, they should also pass him by.” For the next two weeks, the senior minister from Upper Canada boycotted the royal tour. The politician who had resigned because Parliament had insulted Queen Victoria over Ottawa had placed himself in the invidious position of snubbing her son and heir. Eventually, Macdonald swallowed his pride and rejoined the official party. Not surprisingly, there were suspicions he had been on drunken bender.

      Macdonald’s political standing was so shaken that he embarked on a speaking tour of the province, to rebuild his grassroots support. “I never took to the stump before,” he commented, but he enjoyed the experience. Unfortunately, extremist Orangemen believed Macdonald had not done enough to defend them, and at the next elections, in the summer of 1861, his Protestant power base in Kingston was fractured. His one-time law pupil, Oliver Mowat, was imported from Toronto to run against him — it was no accident that Mowat was a prominent teetotaller. Kingston rejected the interloper by 785 votes to 484, a come-down from Macdonald’s eleven hundred vote triumph in 1857. He owed his victory to Catholic voters, many of whom backed him as the lesser of two evils. Macdonald’s majority was less secure than it appeared.

      The Conservatives did well across Upper Canada but, paradoxically, success added to Macdonald’s problems. To his puzzlement, “the dry bones of Pre-Adamite Toryism” had stirred into new life. By abolishing the clergy reserves, he had done the extreme Tories the favour of freeing them from an unpopular cause. The 1861 elections were held soon after preliminary results from that year’s census showed that Upper Canada now had 1.4 million people, well ahead of Lower Canada’s 1.1 million. Tories increasingly vented their contempt for French Catholics under the fair-play guise of demanding representation by population. Macdonald condemned the “violent Tories” who stupidly believed “that a purely Conservative Government can be formed.” Any such attempt would merely reunite all brands of Reformers, who collectively had a built-in majority in go-ahead Upper Canada. “I am not such a fool as to destroy all that I have been doing for the last 7 years.” But when Cabinet changes were needed in March 1862, it was impossible to find any Conservative opposed to rep. by pop. Indeed, the Tories demanded that they should dominate the government. An emerging Lower Canadian centre group, the Mauves (a mixture of Rouge and Bleu) added to the instability.

      The outbreak of the American Civil War created fresh challenges. In November 1861 a Northern warship seized two Southern envoys travelling to Europe on a British steamship. Britain angrily demanded an apology, and war was briefly threatened. The crisis destroyed any lingering belief that the Empire could protect Canada from invasion. British reinforcements were rushed across the Atlantic, although the lack of a railway from Halifax prevented most from reaching the interior of Canada. The imperial garrison was boosted to 14,000 troops. This would have deterred the 16,000-strong pre-1861 United States Army, but it was useless against the massive forces engaged in the Civil War: the North suffered 15,000 casualties in a single week of battles in June 1862 — and went on fighting.

      Nominally, every adult male from sixteen to fifty served in Canada’s militia: that was why Macdonald had marched against Mackenzie’s rebels in 1837. Now, as the first-ever minister of militia, he introduced a sweeping reform measure, to create a part-time army, intensively (and expensively) trained. The details of his Militia Bill were both vague and alarming. Military experts spoke of training 100,000 men; Macdonald talked of 50,000, maybe costing a million dollars. Financially, this was a nightmare: Galt’s latest budget already planned to spend $12 million — but revenue would be only $7 million. If there were too few volunteers, conscription would make up the numbers, something especially unpopular in French Canada. Cartier seemed notably unenthusiastic about his own government’s proposal, and Macdonald’s handling of the measure was lacklustre. Worse still, some days the bill stalled because the minister did not appear in Parliament. Macdonald’s absences were caused “nominally by illness,” noted the new governor general, Lord Monck, “but really, as every one knows, by drunkenness.” On May 20, 1862, a Bleu revolt defeated the Militia Bill, and Cartier’s ministry resigned.

      Calling defeat “a grateful tonic,” Macdonald put his usual favourable spin on events. “I chose a soft bed to fall upon ... I fell in a blaze of loyalty.” Perhaps a new phase was opening in his career. The death of Helen Macdonald in October 1862 freed him from acting out his mother’s ambitions. Soon afterwards, he made a private visit to England on Trust and Loan СКАЧАТЬ