the quarter-century of humiliation caused by her husband’s bankruptcy in Glasgow. But Macdonald’s wife was absent from the dockside. Life was going badly for Isabella, and we must probe the mystery of her health. We hear her voice from just two surviving letters, both probably written under heavy medication: “my head is very confused, & I am not sure what I say,” she confessed in one of them. Some male historians have implied that she was a selfish airhead whose hysterical self-pity dragged down her husband’s career —even driving him to drink. However, Isabella Macdonald suffered real pain, likely caused by trigeminal neuralgia, pressure on the facial nerve from enlarged blood vessels that causes a stabbing pain in the face. Often called the “tic” (the name Macdonald used), the condition interferes with normal activities, such as eating, sleeping, and kissing. In Isabella’s case, it sometimes produced total physical collapse. Driven to desperate remedies, she became dependent upon pain-killing opium. Even if perhaps she manipulated her condition to gain control over her own life, her agonies were genuine. Macdonald’s sister Margaret reported Isabella’s “inability to take care of herself,” adding that “poor John however willing” was “nearly as useless as a child” in looking after her.
In the summer of 1844 the Macdonalds had vacationed at New Haven, Connecticut. Isabella was not only determined to return the following year but also to spend the 1845–46 winter in Georgia, although a severe attack in July left her so exhausted that a Kingston doctor feared she would die. “It may be days — nay weeks — before she has rallied sufficiently to attempt any journey,” Macdonald wrote despairingly. But Isabella aimed to get as far away from Canada as possible, and for as long as she could. Within a week of the crisis, she was carried to the Oswego steamboat and the couple started across Lake Ontario for New England. Her exhaustion was so “dreadful” that Macdonald feared his wife “would die on the deck.” Yet, “strange to say her health and strength seemed to return” the further she travelled from Kingston. In October, Macdonald escorted her on the harrowing journey south. Even though Isabella was carried everywhere, exhaustion often forced her “to have recourse to opium.” However, she indomitably insisted on pressing on: Isabella was not the weak heroine of melodrama. Fond of wordplay, Macdonald called her a “Shero,” who “manfully” resisted her affliction. It took three weeks to reach Savannah, where he enjoyed his first taste of peach brandy, but early in December he had to return to Canada.
Macdonald left his wife behind at a time when the United States threatened war against Britain. On December 2, 1845, President James K. Polk aggressively demanded that the British clear out of the Pacific Northwest, the fur-trading region hitherto shared between the two countries. He also insisted that there must be “no future European colony or dominion … planted or established on any part of the North American continent.” The Oregon crisis was resolved by dividing the territory along the forty-ninth parallel, but for several months there was a danger that Isabella would be stranded behind enemy lines. From Kingston in February 1846, Macdonald forlornly hoped his wife “may yet be restored to me, in health, strength and spirits.” In fact, Isabella would be absent from Canada for three years.
If the new member for Kingston was risking his domestic happiness to sit in Parliament, he displayed a surprisingly low political profile, hardly speaking during his first two sessions. Macdonald entered Parliament at a toxic moment. Governor Metcalfe’s narrow election victory was almost entirely based upon an English-Canadian majority. The result was a divided country and a weak government. John A. Macdonald spent the next decade learning the lessons of 1844. Ironically, Metcalfe’s victory had proved Bagot’s point: arguing over responsible government was pointless, for Canada was now governed by the dominant grouping in the Assembly. W.H. Draper, the governor-general’s right-hand man, was effectively premier. Draper’s precarious ministry needed Macdonald’s vote, not his voice.
Keen to promote the interests of Kingston, John A. Macdonald avoided making enemies. Indeed, his most serious clash was with an arch-Tory, W.H. Boulton, who threatened him with a duel for allegedly slandering his family dynasty. (Duelling was going out of fashion, so it was safe to issue the threat.) In 1846, Macdonald secured a charter making Kingston a city, but his main interest was his mortgage business. The Trust and Loan Company’s plan to lend money to farmers was hampered by Canada’s Usury Laws, which capped interest rates. Well-intentioned but short-sighted, the Usury Laws gave Canadians no incentive to save, and made the province unattractive to overseas investors. Macdonald’s strategy was to bypass the obstacle, by seeking an exemption permitting his own company to charge higher rates — which he eventually achieved in 1850.
“I like to steer my own course,” Macdonald assured his family, but he was ambitious for office. As the danger of war with the United States receded, so a new threat to Canada came from Britain itself. Late in 1845, the imperial government announced the end of the Corn Laws, the preferential tariff that enabled Canadian farmers to export their wheat to Britain at lower import duties than their American rivals. Cheap bread was needed to stave off revolution in Britain’s booming industrial towns and among the starving people of Ireland. In effect, Britain turned to the United States for its food. The repeal of the Corn Laws was followed by the end of protection on timber. In Canada, farmers, millers, loggers, and ship-owners faced ruin. Some feared Britain might abandon Canada altogether. The province needed ambitious politicians who would develop its resources.
In June 1846, Premier Draper decided he needed a minister with “activity of mind and familiar with business details” to clean up Canada’s inefficient land-granting agency: Macdonald was the obvious choice. The governor general shared Draper’s “very high opinion” of the thirty-one-year-old member for Kingston. Unfortunately, his appointment was prevented by the venomous split between Tories and moderate Conservatives, “selfishness” versus “patriotism” in Draper’s vocabulary. Forced to appease the diehards, he appointed the even younger John Hillyard Cameron instead. Toronto and privilege had shouldered aside the self-made lawyer from Kingston. For twenty years, Cameron remained Macdonald’s rival in the Conservative party.
Macdonald made his ambitions clear when he renewed his law partnership with Alexander Campbell in September 1846 for a further three years. Campbell received a larger share of the profits — and would be paid still more if Macdonald accepted political office. In December, Draper made Macdonald a Queen’s Counsel. This promotion to senior legal rank allowed him to charge higher fees, and to use a junior barrister — Campbell of course — as his gopher in court cases. If Macdonald quit Parliament, he would have gained something from his time in politics. If he stayed, he was marked out as a potential attorney-
general (justice minister). An angry Toronto newssheet denounced his elevation as “another deep insult offered to the Canadian people”: the mottoes “corruption” and “incapacity” should be sewn on his new silk gown. The twice-weekly Globe was a minor nuisance, run by a young Scotsman called George Brown. Brown belonged to a breakaway Presbyterian church which delighted in denouncing sinners — a strategy incompatible with building political alliances. But, within a decade, the Globe became the most powerful newspaper in Upper Canada and Brown’s the loudest voice in the Reform party — with Macdonald the special target for his venom.
Macdonald perhaps never saw the Globe’s first attack on him. His wife had travelled north from Georgia but was still reluctant to return to Kingston. The couple arranged to celebrate Christmas 1846 in New York, and celebrate they certainly did. Isabella soon discovered that, at the age of thirty-seven, she was expecting her first child: in her weakened state, she might not survive childbirth. Although pregnancies were managed by female relatives, Macdonald briefly considered dropping out of Parliament. However, he decided to return to Montreal for “the last act of my short political career,” a renewed attack on the bigoted Tories who made the Conservative party “stink in the nostrils of all liberal minded people.” In fact, he was appointed to Cabinet. He claimed to be “quite taken by surprise,” but Draper’s comment — “Your turn has come at last” — suggests Macdonald had pressed his claims. The new governor general, Lord Elgin, described Macdonald as “a person of consideration” among the moderate Conservatives whose appointment would strengthen the ministry. Critics
