again: Macdonald died in office partly because he could not walk away.
“A British subject I was born,” Macdonald proclaimed in 1891; “a British subject I will die.” These sentiments of deference to a distant European homeland now seem embarrassing, as if his generation was trapped in colonial adolescence, too scared to accept grown-up nationhood. But there was hard-nosed reality in Macdonald’s rejection of Canadian independence as “all bosh.” In 1891, almost 5,000,000 Canadians lived alongside 63,000,000 Americans: Canada needed a powerful external protector to have any long-term chance of survival. Britain could not prevent an American invasion, but its mighty navy was a vengeful deterrent. Canadians needed to maintain an effective militia for local defence but, overall, it made sense to spend tax dollars on internal development, relying on the British to pay for warships. It was convenient, too, to accept a governor general sent out from “Home,” and avoid the nuisance of presidential elections. Deriving authority from the Westminster Parliament ensured legal continuity, hence the British had some say in the shaping of Confederation. However, Canadians were not subservient to Britain. Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had enjoyed local self-government since 1848, and the new Dominion set its own priorities. British manufacturers were outraged by Macdonald’s National Policy: their taxes paid for Canada’s naval defence, but their goods could not freely enter the Canadian section of the Empire. When Macdonald said he was proud to be British, he meant that he was determined to be Canadian.
In the unique circumstances of Confederation in 1867 Canada’s first prime minister was appointed before the new Dominion’s Parliament had been elected. Impressed by Macdonald’s handling of the new constitution at meetings in London the previous winter, the British chose him for the job, elevating him above his contemporaries with the knighthood that made him Sir John A. Macdonald. To his admirers, the choice was obvious. Ontario, the largest and richest province, claimed the top job, and Macdonald was an efficient administrator and accomplished political manipulator. Unfortunately, Macdonald’s appointment was resented by George-Étienne Cartier, his Quebec ally (and rival). Go-ahead Ontario voters generally voted for Reformers (Liberals, as they gradually came to be called). Far from speaking for Canada’s largest province, as a Conservative, Macdonald belonged to a threatened species. Paradoxically, his big asset was his chief opponent, newspaper owner George Brown, a bully whose mighty Toronto Globe (now the Globe and Mail) denounced anybody who dared disagree with him. Calling himself a Liberal-Conservative, Macdonald welcomed Brown’s victims, maintaining support in his own section by constant coalition-building.
John A. Macdonald’s fondness for wordplay gives us a glimpse of how his mind worked. Once, Isabella’s sister decorated a letter with a mysterious motto, a large capital “I” followed by “2 BU.” Macdonald successfully decoded it as “I long — to be — with you.” Evidently, he would have enjoyed text messaging. He also relished puns. Adulterating sugar was a more serious crime than murder, because it was a grocer offence. The Minotaur, the monster of Greek legend, fell asleep after devouring a maiden, because of “a great lass he chewed” (lassitude!). That horror dates from around 1864, when the same brain was designing the constitution of modern Canada.
John A. Macdonald had one weakness capable of destroying his career: an alcohol problem. To this day, he is often regarded as merely a genial drunk. For two decades from 1856, he occasionally took refuge from his problems — personal, political, and financial — in binge drinking, sometimes at crisis moments in Canada’s destiny. But he was not permanently intoxicated, nor was Canada created in an alcoholic haze. Macdonald was a remarkably effective politician: as he said himself, Canadians preferred John A. drunk to George Brown sober. In the mid-1870s, he faced up to the issue and beat the bottle. His intermittent inebriation stemmed from pressures in his life that can be traced back to his childhood in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was born in 1815.
1
1815–1839
I Had No Boyhood
John Alexander Macdonald was born on January 11, 1815, in Scotland’s industrial city of Glasgow. Most of its 150,000 people lived on the north bank of the Clyde, but Canada’s future prime minister was born “in one of a row of stone tenement houses,” part of a residential area south of the river — “tenement” was a Scots term for an apartment block. His parents were from the Scottish Highlands. Hugh Macdonald was a short man; Helen Shaw was both physically larger and four years older — an age gap that their son replicated in his first marriage. The couple had five children, the last born when Helen was forty. Margaret came first: “my oldest and sincerest friend,” Macdonald called her sixty years later. There were two younger siblings, James and Louisa; another boy had died in infancy. Their mother possessed a driving willpower and a lively sense of humour, both of which she greatly needed. To her son John, she transmitted a determination to succeed in life — as well as his celebrated prominent nose. Helen spoke Gaelic, but Scotland’s ancient language was associated with backwardness, and she did not to pass it on to her son.
Two contrasting stories survive from John A. Macdonald’s early days. One shows him playing to an audience. To impress other children, the four year-old placed a chair on a table, climbed up, and delivered a speech, accompanied by vehement gestures. Unluckily, he overbalanced, fell, and gashed his chin. Macdonald’s first recorded oration left him with a lifelong scar, which photo-graphers generally painted out. He was probably imitating a fiery sermon from a Presbyterian preacher. Perhaps his parents considered a Church career for him, until a schoolmaster in Canada commented that the argumentative boy would make a better lawyer than minister. The second tale reveals an introspective side of young John’s character. Taken for a walk through the busy streets, he became lost in the crowds, but was too young to explain where he lived. Eventually his father rescued him, and punished him. Such were the harsh standards of the time — and this is one of the few glimpses of Hugh in the story.
Glasgow was a boom town, heading for a bust, and Hugh Macdonald was one of the early casualties. When his small-scale textile-manufacturing enterprise failed, relatives blamed “the knavery of a partner,” but he was no businessman, and there are hints that he drank too much: John A. Macdonald’s alcohol problem was probably inherited. Financially ruined, the Macdonalds were forced to seek a new life overseas. In Helen’s complex family network, two relatives might offer support. Her brother, James Shaw, had emigrated to Georgia, while a half-sister, Anna, had married a British Army officer, Donald Macpherson, and settled at Kingston in Upper Canada. Unfortunately, the Macdonalds were not the only members of the extended family in crisis. The children of another half sister, Margaret Clark, were orphaned in 1819.
The five Clark girls were bred for genteel life, and were more likely to find suitable husbands among Southern planters than in the pioneer world of Canada. The eldest of them, Margaret, twenty-two in 1820, led three of her sisters to Georgia. One of them, Isabella, then aged eleven, later became Macdonald’s first wife. However, in childhood, she could hardly have known her five-year-old cousin well.
Another Clark daughter, Maria, fifteen in 1820, joined the Macdonalds to help rear their children, and travelled with the family to Canada. Although ten years his senior, Maria outlived Canada’s first prime minister and became the source of memories of his childhood.
Emigration was often a lottery. If the Clarks had not been orphaned, the Macdonalds might have joined Helen’s brother in Georgia (after all, Hugh knew the cotton trade). Instead of becoming a Father of Canadian Confederation, John A. might have served the Southern Confederacy, fighting to defend slavery in the American Civil War. Instead, the family headed for the Macphersons’ in Kingston. Donald Macpherson had joined the British Army back in 1775, and risen to the rank of colonel, commanding the Kingston garrison when the Americans attacked in 1812. Now retired and a respected citizen, he had recently built a suburban mansion. The Macdonalds moved into his former downtown residence.
It
