And the Reform opposition’s proposal for a dual federation had yet to meet its test in parliament. None could say which seed might grow, to transform the small colonial world of Canada within the years ahead.
At least the outlook in the world abroad seemed promising. In Russia, old Crimean War enemy, a reforming Czar was occupied with freeing the serfs; there, undoubtedly, liberty and progress were sweeping forward. In France, Napoleon III had evidently given up the quest for glory that had led him into war with Austria for the liberation of Italy, and bloodied 1859 with the mass slaughter of Magenta and Solferino. As for Great Britain, it now appeared that she had fully recovered from the double blows of trade depression and the Indian Mutiny. Once more she stood at the peak of industrial and imperial supremacy. Victoria’s wide empire, the Globe assured its readers, was stable and secure about the world.
Canadians that January might well congratulate themselves on the comforting solidity of the Victorian empire – at least, whenever they looked south across their borders to a sorely troubled United States. The republic was still deep in the storm let loose by John Brown’s wild raid on Harper’s Ferry, in a fanatic, futile attempt to raise a slave revolt in Virginia. The would-be liberator had been hanged only a few weeks before, and all the violent passions of the conflict over slavery had raged about his death. He was hero and martyr to Northern abolitionists: madman and monster to Southern slave-holders. His soul assuredly would go marching on – in an abolitionist crusading song that rang ominously with the tramp of armies.
From Canada, the Toronto Globe regarded the bitter American controversy with keen sympathy for the cause of abolitionism. Its owner, after all, was a prominent member of the city’s vigorous Anti-Slavery Society. Nevertheless, his paper recognized that the Harper’s Ferry raid had been hopelessly misguided; and George Brown had himself obtained a legal opinion from Oliver Mowat, his close colleague in the Reform party and associate in the Anti-Slavery Society, affirming that the charge of treason against the raiders would have been upheld in Canadian courts.2 Whatever the rights of the case, the future looked grim enough for the United States. “We take our leave of 1859,” the Globe sombrely closed its survey of the American scene, “with threats of disunion ringing in our ears.”3
Compared with the sectional strife in the American union, the problems facing Canada looked by no means so explosive. Yet here, too – as Brown and the Globe would emphasize – the Canadian union that had been formed in 1841 from the two old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada was racked with sectional discord. Canada West and East were not just halves of the United Province. They were still Upper and Lower Canada to their inhabitants; two widely divergent communities, the one dominated by English-speaking Protestants, the other by French-speaking Roman Catholics, and effectively divided within a common frame of government by the scheme of equal representation that gave the same number of parliamentary seats to each section. The discord between them had reached new heights of vehemence during 1859. It showed no sign of lessening, as Upper Canadians hotly denounced what they regarded as eastern domination of the union, and Lower Canadians grimly resisted any change that might place them in the power of a hostile West.
As the western Reform organ sharply presented it, the chief British province in America lay divided, distracted, and cast down.4 A good harvest had helped the slow and partial recovery from the severe depression of 1857-8; yet it seemed that the heady, boundless optimism of the railway boom of the earlier fifties would never return. Railways had been built; population and economic complexity had grown; but a disappointed, disunited Canada was still little more than a thin margin of settlement in the enormous wilderness of British America. And yet, in spite of every problem, Brown’s Globe looked forward manfully to the 1860s. “Our belief,” it said conclusively, “that Canada contains within herself elements of progress which will yet place her among the foremost nations of the world, is not one jot abated.”5 Was this that wishful thinking called nationalism, which still might put its mark upon the next decade?
A time of the making of nations. Though this was barely foreshadowed, such would the sixties be. In Europe, a united Italy would arise from the bravura of Garibaldi and the calculations of Cavour, even as Bismarck worked towards that German national unity destined to upset the power balance of the world. In the United States, nationalism would triumph, in appalling cost of civil war, and establish the modern centralized republic. And in British North America itself, internal crisis and external threat, dreams and near-desperation, would at last move the provinces into a federal union, the broad continental basis for a Canadian nation-state. There were transforming years ahead, and they would work upon George Brown. The strongest exponent of Upper Canada sectionalism would become an all important builder of the new national design. The moulder and leader of the Clear Grit Reform party of Canada West would exercise a potent influence on Liberalism in the federal Dominion to be proclaimed in 1867. But in the more immediate future lay fresh political defeats and hard new personal trials. Like any other man, Brown was the more fortunate not to see ahead too clearly.
Not that he would have felt great need of foreknowledge: “Sufficient unto the day” had always been his motto. Now, as 1860 opened, he showed no real anxiety for great events impending, good or bad. He was attending closely to the Globe, preparing hopefully for the next political campaign, rejoicing at the re-election of Toronto’s Reform mayor, Adam Wilson. Quite probably he went a few days later to nearby Newmarket, to stand with party stalwarts in a swirling snow-storm as Wilson was also declared victor in the North York by-election, which was held to fill the parliamentary vacancy left by the death of old Joseph Hartman, one of the early Clear Grit Liberals.6
Perhaps, as well, he improved his otherwise hard-working bachelor existence with evenings at the winter lecture series in St. Lawrence Hall, where distinguished visitors such as Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson were currently enlightening Toronto society. At any rate, he was there to introduce Greeley’s address on “Great Men”.7 And his massive six-foot figure loomed up as familiarly among the lecture-going élite at St. Lawrence Hall, at the Music Hall, or at the Lyceum, as it did in the busy crowd on King Street, when he strode along to the Globe office or the St. Charles restaurant, long arms swinging, a ready smile for an acquaintance on his eager, expressive face. He was forty-one. His red hair was fading somewhat into brown, and had sufficiently receded that a hostile observer could unkindly term him “a hungry-looking, bald-headed individual”.8 Still, Brown’s long, strong features, powerful jaw, and piercing blue eyes might well have appeared hungry-looking to the aforesaid observer (one Captain Rhys), seeing that the Captain’s calm proposal that the Globe print his theatrical posters on credit had been indignantly rejected.9
In fact, however, Brown was his old vigorous self: decided in his likes and dislikes, equally decided in revealing them. There was no guile in his make-up; and his normal good nature, transparent kindness, and cheerful laughter far outbalanced his sudden bursts of indignation or the aggressive urgency and fervour of his will. His was a forthright, frank simplicity, ruled by a powerful conscience and quick emotions. “Do as you feel right,” he said, “and you will be sure to be right.”10 Of course he could be fiercely uncompromising, imperious, dogmatic. But he was loved and admired by his personal friends and political followers; and there were few indeed of his enemies who did not feel a deep, reluctant respect for him.
His health now appeared fully recovered after the exhaustion and depression of the preceding summer. His optimism and cheerful self-assurance were wholly restored. In short, this much was certain: that as George Brown moved forward into a new era, his confidence in the future was – in the Globe’s own announcement – “not one jot abated”.
2
Brown had more to announce that January in his paper. He had been busy for weeks at the office on the latest large-scale project to improve the Globe, and the journal bowed in the new year in what it modestly called “the handsomest new dress yet”.11 This was the result of a new font of copper-faced type, of the most modern cut,
