1867 (27 page)

In the Canadian legislature, then in the midst of its confederation debate, the
rouges
and other opponents of confederation used the New Brunswick results to argue that confederation should simply be abandoned, since it was now dead in the Maritimes (the Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland legislatures had already refused to proceed with the Quebec resolutions). Instead, Macdonald moved to force an immediate vote on the Quebec resolutions. Canadian backbenchers were as free as those in New Brunswick to abandon the government if they judged it wise to do so, but the coalition leaders were confident that their members still supported them and the confederation plan. Indeed, the Canadian legislature seemed undaunted by the New Brunswick results. Its members closed the debate and approved the Quebec resolutions with a nearly three-to-one majority.

There was no such confidence in Nova Scotia. Charles Tupper had returned from Quebec full of his usual confident bluster. He had always declared that the legislature was the appropriate place for the Quebec resolutions to be ratified or rejected. Since the legislature included a large majority of his supporters, and since the opposition leaders were also with him, he foresaw no elections. He seems to have expected to have the Quebec resolutions quickly ratified.

Instead, Tupper encountered the same surging resistance as Tilley. Nova Scotia felt no more urgent spur towards constitutional change than New Brunswick, and many of its commercial and political leaders were horrified by the terms Tupper had accepted at Quebec. Albert Gilpin Jones, who had organized Tupper’s electoral triumph eighteen months earlier, denounced him and called the financial terms a disaster for the province. Thomas Coffin of Shelburne, Thomas Killam of Yarmouth, and Archibald McLelan of Minas – all sailors and shipbuilders, and all members of the legislature – spoke out for the province’s powerful shipping and trading interests. “Nova Scotia had more ships in the port of Calcutta in any day of the year than … in all the ports of Canada,” McLelan said scornfully, but Canadian tariffs would force Nova Scotia to abandon
its free-ranging, low-tariff sea trades.
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Halifax merchant banker William Stairs predicted high taxes and high tariffs to subsidize costly Canadian experiments with railways, industrial development, and westward expansion.

Hearing such arguments, Jonathan McCully fumed about the conservatism of the rich. He accused those who had “money made” of blocking the ambitions of those who were seeking new opportunities. But that kind of counter-attack only seemed to confirm that confederation would force radical economic change upon the province. In fact, Tupper, who had gone to Quebec with four lawyers and no businessmen, had accepted financial arrangements that would make it difficult for Nova Scotia to avoid rapid bankruptcy if it joined the union. Confederation’s critics savaged these terms, and even would-be unionists declared them impossible to swallow.

Not all objections came from the pocketbook. A potent mix of quasi-national pride and Imperial loyalty led many Nova Scotians to fear that confederation would make their province a very junior partner in a new and unwelcome nationality. The old, established province, once the richest of the British North American colonies, still saw itself as the senior colony, the most cultured and best endowed with higher learning. In its newspapers and meeting places, the public men of the province launched a searching critique of the Quebec resolutions, and, by the end of 1864, a consensus against confederation seemed to have formed. Joseph Howe thrilled with pride. “People were told that opposition would be vain,” he wrote. “They had to study the measure, to look for leaders, to cast off the trammels of party, to form new combinations and to defend their institutions from this sudden surprise as they best could. Nothing illustrates more finely the high spirit and intellectual resources of Nova Scotia than the rapidity with which all this was done.”
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Howe had come late to Nova Scotia’s confederation debate. The ex-premier and elder statesman had been busy with his duties on the Imperial fisheries inquiry, and at first Nova Scotian opposition to confederation blossomed without him. But he was only sixty, as
assertive as ever, and sure that he understood Nova Scotia and its needs more deeply than anyone. He had often looked forward to uniting the British colonies of North America, but the Quebec resolutions and their strongly “Canadian” emphasis appalled him. From the beginning of 1865, Howe strengthened the anti-confederate cause with his prestige and his phrase-making.

Howe made confederation a question of the rights of Nova Scotians. Responsible government had been his great achievement, and he reminded Nova Scotians of “the great battle by which the appointment of our own officers, the control of our own revenues, the management of our own affairs, was secured to Nova Scotians.” Howe denounced the Quebec resolutions as a scheme to transfer those precious rights to a government answerable to Upper and Lower Canadians, not Nova Scotians. “This crazy confederacy” was not merely misguided, he said, it was illegitimate. It was unconstitutional.
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As resistance to the Quebec plan swept the province, Tupper’s comfortable legislative majority crumbled. One of his cabinet ministers, John McKinnon of Antigonish, resigned rather than endorse the Quebec resolutions. Even Robert Dickey, government leader in the upper house and a delegate to both Charlottetown and Quebec, declared his lack of enthusiasm for the terms. Opposition leaders Archibald and McCully never wavered in their support for the Quebec agreement – they “stood by me like trumps,” said Tupper rather possessively – but most of the reform caucus renounced them. They dumped Archibald from his position as party leader and leader of the opposition and chose William Annand in his place.
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Annand was Howe’s most devoted admirer, nicknamed “Boots” for his devotion, and the editor of Howe’s collected works. A journalist by profession, he had made fellow reformer Jonathan McCully editor of his influential newspaper, the
Morning Chronicle
. Since Charlottetown, McCully had made the
Chronicle
a strong voice for confederation. But McCully was only the editor. Annand owned the paper. As soon as Annand committed himself to the anti-confederate cause, he fired McCully, and the
Chronicle
began to publish
Howe’s rush of anti-confederate fury, the “Botheration Letters.” McCully scrambled to start a new newspaper, the
Unionist
.

In the first days of 1865, Tupper still claimed to believe the Nova Scotia legislature might endorse the Quebec resolutions when it met in February. “I hope we will carry the day,” he wrote to John A. Macdonald. But when Tilley called the election in New Brunswick and went plunging toward defeat, he took the prospects for ratification in Nova Scotia down with him. “Had he waited,” Tupper complained to Macdonald, “by great sacrifices and exertions, we could, I think, have secured a bare majority.” After the collapse of confederation in New Brunswick, however, the Nova Scotia members would not annoy their constituents in a pointless gesture. “A number here who might have been disposed to sacrifice their own position to achieve an important object would not be willing to do so without any practical result to be attained,” Tupper told Lieutenant-Governor Richard MacDonell mournfully.
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Thwarted in the New Brunswick assembly, Tilley had faced a general election. Thwarted in the Nova Scotia assembly, Tupper preferred the strategy of delay. Since Nova Scotia’s assembly could not be persuaded to vote in favour of the Quebec plan, Tupper encouraged it not to vote on it at all. Annand and Howe were endorsing the old dream of rebuilding greater Nova Scotia through Maritime union, so Tupper indulged them. Declaring blandly that “immediate” action on the larger Quebec plan had become “impracticable,” he persuaded the legislature to renew negotiations for a union with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. When, as he fully expected, Prince Edward Island dismissed the idea as flatly as it had at Charlottetown, the anti-confederates’ claim to have a feasible alternative to confederation was neatly skewered. Almost the entire debate on his “Maritime union” resolution had focused on confederation, but Tupper had avoided a negative vote on it.
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For the rest of 1865, Tupper avoided asking the legislature or the electorate to decide on confederation. Tupper insisted it was all up to the legislature. “If the people’s representatives are satisfied that
the country is opposed to this union, they can reject it, or they can obtain a dissolution by asking for it,” he said, promising that the government would “leave its decision to the independent action of the legislature.” But the opponents and doubters also shrank from forcing the issue. Even when by-elections swelled the anti-confederate ranks, they allowed Tupper to pursue his policy of delay. The Quebec resolutions lay on the table, neither endorsed nor rejected, and Tupper remained in power. His optimism revived. “Twelve months will, I believe, find a decided majority in the present parliament in favour of confederation,” he declared in April 1865, and he was prepared to wait.
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At first, delay seemed most likely to compound Tupper’s problems. With confederation blocked, perhaps permanently, in the Maritimes, some Upper Canadian reformers began to urge the achievement of their goal, rep-by-pop, by federating Upper and Lower Canada alone. The coalition held to its commitment to the larger plan, but Upper Canada was unlikely to wait forever for rep-by-pop, when three Maritime provinces were on record against the union proposed at Quebec. Then Leonard Tilley’s prediction began to come true.

During 1865, Tilley’s decision to go to the people, even at the price of being driven from office, began to seem brilliant. By throwing confederation’s critics into office, New Brunswick had made them display how unprepared they were, and their alternatives to confederation began to seem threadbare and incoherent. Albert Smith and George Hatheway (who after abandoning Tilley’s cabinet had joined Smith’s) held views not far removed from those of Hector Langevin or Oliver Mowat. They suspected the Quebec terms because they feared the rights of the provinces had been inadequately secured against federal interference. But Robert Wilmot, Smith’s government leader in the upper house, and his attorney-general, John Allen, opposed the Quebec resolutions for the opposite reason. Closer to John A. Macdonald than to their own leader, Wilmot and Allen spoke for a faction that feared the Quebec terms had not given
the central government enough strength to hold the new nation together. The fiery Saint John journalist Timothy Anglin, meanwhile, had delivered much of the Irish-Catholic vote to the anti-confederate cause and could not be denied a cabinet seat, despite the discomfort he caused to patrician Anglicans like Wilmot.

Events conspired dramatically against the Smith government. By the fall of 1865, railway policies, religious antagonisms, disputes over patronage, and cabinet bickering had discredited the new government. London was emphasizing its desire to see confederation ratified, and Lieutenant-Governor Gordon, whose open dislike of the Quebec resolutions had helped undermine Tilley late in 1864, had now accepted his orders from the Colonial Office and began to harass Smith. Robert Wilmot, one of the pillars of the Smith government, was drawn into negotiations with the Canadian government over trade and came to recognize, as the Quebec delegates had, that a tightly centralized union would always be unacceptable to Lower Canada. His opposition to the Quebec resolutions faded as he abandoned legislative union as an impractical will-of-the-wisp, and he left Smith’s cabinet.

In 1865, as the American civil war ended, Fenian raiders began to attack the British North American colonies as a way to punish Britain for its control of Ireland. The raids, by Irish-Americans who had learned soldiering in the Northern armies, would prove to be small, disorganized, and easily contained. But they were a boon to confederation supporters, who could preach unity in the face of external threat much more plausibly than their opponents. As Irish raiders menaced New Brunswick, a brutal smear campaign, questioning the loyalty of Irish Catholics who opposed the Quebec resolutions, drove Timothy Anglin from Smith’s cabinet. Such attacks also helped persuade the leaders of New Brunswick’s clerical hierarchy, who had been dubious about confederation, to affirm their loyalty by calling for approval of the Quebec plan.

When a by-election was called in York County, the region surrounding Fredericton, Charles Fisher, who had been a delegate to
Quebec and had been defeated in the general election, ran again. It was a hard-fought campaign. Tilley told John A. Macdonald it could be won – “with the expenditure of eight or ten thousand dollars.” While his backers poured drinks and promised favours, Fisher made extravagant commitments, exploited Protestant bigotry against Anglin, and mocked the government’s decisions. With anti-confederate funding from Halifax, Smith’s supporters fought back just as hard. They, even more than Fisher, insisted that confederation was the central issue. Fisher won by a large majority. Barely six months after the New Brunswick general election, the death watch on the Smith government began.
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As the coalition against confederation crumbled, Tilley, confederation, and the Quebec resolutions re-occupied the moderate middle ground. Indeed, it began to seem likely that, if Smith’s government did not endorse confederation, the members elected as anti-confederates just a few months earlier would put in a new cabinet that would. Smith actually agreed to endorse confederation in principle but, pushed hard by Lieutenant-Governor Gordon to accept the Quebec resolutions themselves, he resigned. Robert Wilmot formed a government, but the anti-confederates remained strong enough to defeat it and force a second general election.

The second New Brunswick election was a great confederation triumph – and a famously corrupt campaign. Thousands of dollars of “the needful” (as Tilley called it in a letter to Macdonald) flowed in from Canada to support the confederates, and thousands more came from Halifax to shore up the anti-confederates. Anyone whose vote was for sale could expect a record price. Sober analysis of the Quebec resolutions was almost drowned out by Fenian scares, accusations of disloyalty, and appeals to religious bigotry and crude self-interest. But, after a year in which confederation had been the dominant issue of New Brunswick politics, the voters endorsed it even more decisively than they had rejected it a year earlier. Having fought two elections in one year on constitutional issues, Leonard
Tilley was back in power. New Brunswick’s legislature, quickly recalled for a rare summertime session, endorsed his resolution in favour of confederation thirty-one to eight. Just in case the upheavals had strengthened New Brunswick’s hand at the bargaining table, however, the House approved not the Quebec resolutions, but confederation “upon such terms as will secure the rights and interests of New Brunswick.”
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