Macdonald disliked getting up in the mornings. One day, unable to rouse him, Sarah Mackenzie closed off every chink of light in the lad’s bedroom and left him comatose in pitch darkness. When he eventually shook himself awake and opened the curtains, the sun was setting. The problem did not recur.
Young Macdonald’s sharp intelligence and a photographic memory impressed his boss and, late in 1832, Mackenzie sent him to manage a branch law office at Napanee, forty kilometres west of Kingston. Not quite eighteen and operating independently for the first time, Macdonald had to choose the personality he wished to project. Initially, he wrapped himself in professional dignity, perhaps emulating his father’s prickly concern for status. Mackenzie criticized his “dead & alive” pomposity. “I do not think you are so free & lively with the people as a young man eager for their good will should be.” John A. Macdonald kept that letter, which contained some of the best advice he ever received. He would become another George Mackenzie, not a second Hugh Macdonald.
At the end of 1833, another opportunity presented itself. His lawyer cousin Lowther Pennington Macpherson — the old colonel’s son — was dying of a lung disease, and under medical advice to escape the Canadian winter. Macpherson needed Macdonald to run his law office at Hallowell, in Prince Edward County. George Mackenzie graciously released him, and Macdonald found himself ten kilometres from the family home at Glenora. But was Hallowell an opportunity or a trap? Macpherson reported August 1834 that his cough was worse. “God only knows how it is to terminate.” Cousin Lowther would never return, but John A. Macdonald had no wish to be consigned to a country backwater.
Even in the 1830s, Hallowell was overshadowed by its neighbour, Picton. The young man appreciatively remembered as a “poor and friendless boy” supported a campaign to merge the two communities under a neutral name, Port William, in honour of King William IV. John A. Macdonald’s first attempt at a negotiated union under the symbolic headship of the British Crown was a failure: ambitious Picton simply swallowed up its neighbour. Thirty years later, Macdonald successfully led a second such project, Confederation, on a continental scale. At Hallowell, Macdonald took his first steps in community activity, helping to found a debating club, and serving as secretary of the local school board. Keen to keep him in town, local businessmen reportedly offered to finance him in his own law practice, but his ambitions lay elsewhere.
John A. Macdonald seemed on track to becoming George Mackenzie’s junior partner. Mackenzie was planning a political career and would need a trusted lieutenant to manage his law office and his election campaigns in Kingston. Rejecting the political polarization which later provoked the 1837 rebellions, Mackenzie sought the middle ground, advocating precisely the moderate Conservatism that Macdonald himself later championed. But the partnership never happened. In August 1834, cholera swept across Canada. The terrifying disease could kill within forty-eight hours and George Mackenzie was one of its victims. For John A. Macdonald, it was suddenly important to return to Kingston and inherit Mackenzie’s clients. His motivation was not entirely cynical. The back roads of rural Canada were notoriously bad, and travel through country districts was only possible on horseback. Macdonald tried it — and fell, breaking his arm. In Kingston, lawyers sat in comfortable offices and waited for clients to come to them. Macdonald redoubled his efforts to qualify, and we have a glimpse of him sitting under a willow tree in a Hallowell garden, “studying intently” while small boys played leap-frog around him. He passed his examinations and, in August 1835, set up in business as an attorney in a cross-street off Kingston’s central business district.
There is a mystery here. Born in January 1815, Macdonald was twenty when he opened his first law office — but the minimum age to practise was twenty-one. His birth had been formally recorded, in distant Edinburgh, but Canada had no registration system. Apparently, John A.’s father agreed to counter-sign a statement backdating his birth by twelve months: in later years, the year of his birth was often given as 1814. It seems the first formal act of John A. Macdonald’s legal career was to commit perjury — a harbinger of his ruthless readiness to cut corners in later life.
The young adult John A. Macdonald was “slender, with a marked disinclination to corpulency.” Even in his seventies, leading a sedentary life as prime minister, his weight just topped eighty kilograms (180 pounds or under thirteen stone) — light enough for someone who was five feet, eleven inches (180 centimetres) tall — well above the average of the time. But he did not use his height to overawe. Macdonald had a slight stoop, an inclusive gesture that put people at ease. James Porter, a Picton acquaintance, recalled spotting him on the streets of Kingston whenever he visited the town — and was flattered to be affably recognized: “he wouldn’t wait for me to come and speak, but he would duck his head in that peculiar way of his, and come right across the street to shake hands.” The greeting was informal, man-to-man: “Damn it, Porter, are you alive yet?” Macdonald claimed that he forgot only one face in a thousand, and his impressive memory for people he had only met briefly would win him devotees across Canada. He had absorbed George Mackenzie’s advice to loosen up: “no client, however poor, ever came out of Mr. Macdonald’s office complaining of snobbery.”
His giant nose and unruly black hair contributed to an unforgettable face, but not a pretty one. When Louisa was congratulated on resembling her famous brother, she indignantly commented that he was the ugliest man in Canada. It was a face full of character, manipulated by “a consummate actor,” with “a strong desire to please,” who could easily “assume the role of the intensely interested recipient.” In the early years of slow-exposure photography, sitters had to remain motionless for lengthy periods. Hence most nineteenth-century politicians glare at us, pop-eyed with tension. But even the earliest photographs of John A. Macdonald convey a lively, genial personality: one of his theatrical skills was his ability to hold a pose. Yet he was not merely playing a role. Macdonald’s “wit and his inexhaustible fund of anecdote” infused every gathering that he attended. One critic remembered prime-ministerial dinner parties, where Macdonald carried on a serious conversation at one end of the table, while “telling risqué anecdotes to the guests at the other end.”
As James Porter recalled, “there wasn’t much fun that John A. wasn’t up to.” At Picton, he formed a mock order of chivalry, la Société de la Vache Rouge (Knights of the Red Cow). One Christmas, Macdonald brought the Knights to Glenora for the ceremonial enthronement of his mother as patroness, a paper knife serving as her sword of office. As master of ceremonies, John A. wisecracked his way through the proceedings until tears of laughter ran down Helen’s face. “God help us for a set of fools!” she exclaimed. Years later, Macdonald told an astonished British statesman about an American vacation he had taken with two friends, in which they pretended to be strolling players. Calling at taverns, Macdonald played tunes, one of his companions pretended to be a dancing bear while the third collected coins from onlookers.
Macdonald enjoyed irresponsible pranks. On summer night in Kingston, he led a group of friends in bricking up old Jemmy Williamson’s doorway, a stunt requiring a couple of hours of silent labour. From a hiding place, they threw pebbles at the bedroom window until Williamson came downstairs to investigate. A solemn Scotsman who believed in Hellfire religion, he thought he had been walled in as a punishment for his sins. An earlier joke was even less amusing. A Picton hotelier was notorious for driving his buggy at daredevil speed through the town. One night Macdonald slowed him down by building a barrier across the darkened street. The victim escaped unhurt, but his buggy was damaged and the horse badly injured. Worse still, suspicion fell on an innocent man: Macdonald confessed, but managed to get the affair hushed up. He was less fortunate when an altercation with a local doctor came to court, although the assault charge against him failed: punches had been thrown when the medical gentleman had dismissed the young law clerk as a “lousy Scotchman.”
Macdonald was also engaged in serious activity in the adult world. He was elected to a junior office in Kingston’s Celtic Society, with twice-yearly banquets including toasts damning Canada’s “external and internal enemies” (Americans and radicals) and praising “the immortal memory” of James Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec. This organization embodied an important Scots network,
