who thought that new men in a new combination, freed from the “extremists”, could somehow satisfy both sections and make the present union work. Let the moderate men try, and in trying prove their bankruptcy – along with that of the union itself. Brown could afford to wait. He could no longer be used as an excuse for the persistence of sectional friction, the reputed trouble-maker blamed for all the discord in the union’s politics. Dorion had given him a further excellent reason for retirement.
He had made his gesture for party reconstruction. He now withdrew from further political activity, refusing invitations to party rallies in August on the grounds that the Toronto election had “relieved me of public responsibility, and I think it best to enjoy the full benefit of the period of relaxing at my disposal”.64 That is, he would relax from politics, so far as the owner of the Globe and the ertswhile leader of Reform could ever find this possible.
4
Wonderful changes were occurring in Upper Canada’s far south-west, Brown’s favourite countryside. Oilfields were being developed not twenty miles from Sarnia in Lambton County, his old constituency, and near Bothwell in the adjoining county of Kent: the settlement that had grown up out of his own estate. In September, the Globe ran a series of long articles on the “Oil Region” that was rapidly coming into production.65 “Rock oil” – petroleum – had gained a new significance in two short years since 1859, when Edwin Drake had drilled a well in Pennsylvania to tap rich sources far underground. Henceforth, instead of the limited, scanty offerings of shallow pools and hand-dug wells, drilled wells promised to provide an ample flow of petroleum for commercial uses: above all, to replace the whale-oil of a lamp-lit civilization. The resulting boom in rock oil had brought a spate of advertisements in the Canadian press (“Beauty, Brilliancy, Economy – NOT Explosive”) and produced a flurry of well-drilling in Upper Canada in those parts where surface oil pools had long been known and utilized.66
Enniskillen Township in Lambton and lands along the Thames a few miles from Bothwell were notable areas of this kind. Here Indians had prized the dark and scummy oil pools for their medicinal value, and had dipped blankets in their surface, wringing them out to obtain the oil. It was said that natives who swallowed this “lion’s grease” never took the cholera – or rather, never died of cholera, which was not quite the same thing.67 But now this land of pools was prized far more highly, as, in happy bewilderment, settlers who had replaced the wandering Indians saw speculators lease portions of their farms and drill wells in frantic haste. An ugly litter of rough pole derricks, squat black oil vats, piles of barrels, and greasy mounds of mud spread out through clearings in the still-enclosing forests. The creak of the wooden treadles that drove the drills continued day and night, and always there was the harsh smell of oil and escaping gas.
Men with packsacks were tramping to the “oil springs” to make their fortunes.68 Teamsters were making theirs, as they hauled wagon-loads of barrelled oil down jolting, rutted trails to the railway line, where the Great Western’s new oil cars were waiting. Plank roads were going in; taverns and hotels were going up. The far south-west was entering on a land boom greater than anything it had yet known. And Bothwell, on the railway, was ideally situated to enjoy it – there where Brown’s own lands lay. There could be little question now about his credit, or the value of his holdings. The new questions facing him were what to buy and when to sell, and when the boom might reach its peak.
He bought 400 more acres, and for the time being held on.69 Apart from his sawmills, he enjoyed the working and developing of his Bothwell farm; in any case, the boom was still too young to foresee how it might grow in that quarter. No doubt, he went up to Kent and Lambton to watch the developments for himself. In October, at any rate, he could see them gain fresh impetus from the application of the new Pennsylvania technique of deep drilling.70 Wells were being sunk beyond 200 feet now, instead of less than 100, and were producing a continuous flow of oil in large quantities. The remaining problems were the market and the price. Thanks to the lack of sufficient Canadian refineries, American imports were largely supplying the province’s needs, and Canadian crude was worth but six and a half cents a gallon at railhead.
It was natural that Brown’s Globe should hail the building of new refineries in Sarnia, London, Toronto, and elsewhere, and deem it “suicidal” for Torontonians with sensitive noses to try to block the building of still another refinery in the city.71 It mused besides on the full meaning of the “recent remarkable discoveries” in the western peninsula. Where would they all lead? “We are apparently only at the beginning of a very remarkable change in the arrangements of civilized man for illuminating the darkness of the night – but none can say how far the revolution will go.”72 No one, indeed, could then have measured the oil revolution. Yet Canada, and Brown, were caught up in its first stirrings.
They were also caught up in something far less attractive and more ominous that autumn: the reverberations of the American Civil War. It had never been far from mind since the fighting had started in the spring. For Canadians, it was like a deep, unceasing drum-beat in the background: sometimes drowned by their own outcries over the census, rep by pop, or the general elections; sometimes swelling in its own crescendos, as during the first great battle of Bull Run in late July. Yet always it was there. Nor was it merely that Canadians were front-row spectators of an immense conflict. The war was rousing old antagonisms between the United States and Britain, between Americans and British subjects in America. And, more and more, the problem of their own defence began to loom as a serious question for Canadians, as the war and growing international tension went onward without sign of end.
They had lost much of their initial sympathy for the Northern cause, which had largely been based on their own strong aversion to slavery. When it became apparent that Lincoln and the Republicans did not, after all, intend to fight a war to free the slaves but rather to preserve the American union, the Canadians had felt disgruntled and confused. Many asked why it had been right for the thirteen original colonies to declare their independence, but wrong for the southern states to do the same. Some degree of sentiment favourable to the South emerged: either for resolute men struggling for their liberty, or for discontented states that had proved that the sprawling democratic republic was inherently unsound and must collapse. In short, either the left or right in Canadian political opinion could turn pro-Southern, though the trend became more noticeable in the Conservative press. Furthermore, the colonial views might often echo those of the Mother country, where the governing classes decidedly sympathized with the “gentlemanly” South – although leading British middle-class Liberals like Richard Cobden and John Bright, with strong working-class support, maintained their faith in the democracy of the American North, and in its ultimate decision to abolish slavery.73
There were other reasons, too, for a Canadian reaction against the North. The Americans’ rather irritating tendency to identify their own purposes with Divine plan had led them to angry denunciations of the British, who at home and in America had not shown proper willingness to aid the sword of the Lord in putting down most foul rebellion.74 They had not opened the colonies’ skimpy stock of arms for Northern use; they had even presumed to invoke neutrality in the struggle.75 And mounting American resentment showed itself further in renewed talk of wresting British North America from England. The powerful New York Herald had pushed the project quite cold-bloodedly, either as a means of reuniting the divided states in a war against the old national enemy, or as a consolation prize to the North for letting the South go.76 This sort of talk might be discounted as so much American press bluster, except that it expressed a genuine growth of animosity to Britain in the United States. It even seemed to be reflected in the policies of Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, who in the early months of the war toyed with notions of his own for exploiting anti-British sentiment, and by no means kept them hidden.77
Consequently, as British-American relations deteriorated almost steadily throughout 1861, and as Canadian and American newspapers snapped at each other across the border, it was all the more noteworthy that the largest
