Blood and Daring (32 page)

The British and American press heaped scorn on the Canadian government for the defeat of the Militia Bill, arguing that Canadians simply did not have the strength or stomach to defend themselves.
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Little Englanders such as Gladstone, John Bright and Richard Cobden had a field day, as the troublesome, expensive and unreliable colony looked as if it might yet drag Britain into a war with the United States. They called for British North America to be set adrift.
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Even those who supported Canada found it difficult to remain sanguine. The Duke of Newcastle, for instance, wrote a long letter to Monck expressing tremendous frustration and foreboding: “Everybody in the States will look upon it as little less than an invitation to come and annex it. The event will create as much joy in New York as it has caused concern in London.”
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The Sandfield Macdonald–Sicotte government was shamed into action and tripled the defence budget so that some work could be done, but it was not nearly enough. There were still far too few troops, forts and weapons. A Maritime intercolonial railway, which could move men and equipment quickly in a time of crisis, remained a dream.

George Brown missed it all. His tenuous health led to the first extended holiday of his life. In July 1862, he arrived in Britain, where he enjoyed a leisurely time in London and Edinburgh. While there, Brown met Anne Nelson, the attractive, charming and highly intelligent daughter of a wealthy Scottish publisher. He was smitten. Thirty-three-year-old
Anne was well educated, well read and articluate. She had lived in Germany and France, and enjoyed debating political matters from a decidedly liberal point of view. The two were married at a lavish ceremony, and set out for Canada in December. Even the mammoth swells of the frigid North Atlantic could not diminish the happiness they found with each other.

The forty-three-year-old Brown came home a changed man. He returned to the
Globe
and to his growing Bothwell estate and related businesses with a temper less quick and a disposition more tolerant. He found in Anne a confidante who persuaded him to put aside personal affronts and quick, cheap victories in favour of steady long-term progress. In March 1863, he was back in the legislature after easily winning a by-election in South Oxford. Brown bided his time on the government’s back benches. He did not ask for a cabinet post; nor was one offered.

Three months later, Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg altered the trajectory of the Civil War. Lincoln still faced tremendous and competing challenges, but Jefferson Davis was juggling even more problems. So many Southern troops were deserting that on August 1 Davis issued an order offering amnesty to any soldiers who returned to duty. Slaves were taken from plantations to do construction work and other jobs that soldiers had previously done. Across the South, food shortages were being felt and in Mobile, Alabama, troops had to quell a food riot. The Confederate currency was devaluing rapidly and Confederate bonds were becoming harder to sell. North Carolina farmers were having their property confiscated in an attempt to collect desperately needed tax revenue.

By the fall of 1863, the war’s outcome was still far from certain, but the South’s declining morale and rising financial, human and physical costs revealed a discernible trend. The increasing likelihood of a Northern victory caused great consternation in Canada and the Maritimes, for it was becoming clear that the United States would emerge from the war stronger than it had ever been. The Northern economy would be richer and more technologically advanced thanks to the impressive manner in
which it met its need for war
matériel
. More rail had been laid and telegraph lines strung; harbours had been enlarged. The agricultural capacity of the North would also be greatly increased by Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act, which was opening vast swaths of fertile land in the west to the plows of thousands of immigrants. And the United States would emerge from war with the largest, most advanced, best-trained, and most battle-hardened military the world had ever seen. Canadians and Maritimers were justifiably concerned that an angry behemoth of a country would have the ability to easily right past wrongs and pursue its old dreams of Manifest Destiny.

Brown was among those who realized that in order for the United States to wreak havoc on Canada, an American military invasion might not even be necessary. The American-Canadian Reciprocity Treaty was soon due to expire. At the outset of the war, Lord Lyons had worried about the treaty becoming one of its victims. Lyons and Monck exchanged a number of letters about the treaty’s importance and agreed that the best way to keep it in place was to remain quiet about it.
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In February 1862, Congress had created a three-man commission to examine the treaty question, and by June Lyons was warning Monck that Canada should be prepared to see it abrogated.
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The economic effects of the treaty’s repeal would damage Canada’s nascent industrial development. But there were other concerns. British investors controlling Hudson’s Bay Company stock still claimed ownership of the vast swathe of territory called Rupert’s Land. Brown knew that the land was ripe for development and that if Canadian interests did not quickly exploit its potential then Americans certainly would. He editorialized in the
Globe
, “Cooped up as Canada is between lake, river and the frozen North, should all the rest of the continent fall into the possession of the Americans, she will become of the smallest importance … nothing more or less than the handing over of the vast North West Territory, not only commercially but politically, to the United States.”
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He believed that American annexationists were biding their time and would pounce when the war ended.

By early 1864, the only Canadians who were not afraid were not paying attention. While Confederation had been a good idea before, the war had rendered it an imperative. Canada’s constitutional questions needed to be solved once and for all; further delay would be suicidal. It was in this charged atmosphere that the Canadian Parliament convened in February.

Jammed in the gridlock that had paralyzed the Sandfield Macdonald administration throughout the previous session, the government proposed little and did less. Brown was silent and spent most of his time at his desk writing to Anne, who had just given birth to a healthy girl. Finally, on March 14, he interrupted one of the House’s endless arcane debates by suddenly rising to propose a startling resolution. He proposed that a committee made up of members from both parties be formed to investigate the possibility of constitutional change: “I simply ask the House to say that a great evil exists, that a remedy must be found, and to appoint a committee to consider what that remedy should be.”
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A spontaneous and shouting debate erupted, in which Galt, John A. Macdonald and Cartier all derided not what Brown had actually said but things he had said in the past. They accused him of having the wrong idea, an anti-French idea or a self-serving idea regarding federation. The debate raged on, with Brown making his final point two weeks later. Referring to military, economic and territorial threats from the United States, he thundered that Canadians needed to “stand shoulder to shoulder to fight their own battle for progress and prosperity, and if need be, to meet and do their best unitedly to repel a common foe.”
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The debate reached a climax, but then events suddenly caused it to fizzle. In late March, an unrelated shift of political support in Canada East led the Reform government to resign. John A. Macdonald quickly hammered together a Conservative coalition and then the House rose so that cabinet ministers could seek re-election. The whole messy affair was proving Brown’s point about Canada’s dysfunctional political system.

While the Canadians dithered, the Civil War continued on toward its inexorable end. In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant had been placed in supreme
command of the Union forces. Lincoln finally had a general who agreed with him that the strategic objective of the Army of the Potomac should not be the capture of Richmond but the destruction of the Southern armies. Grant began reorganizing his army. He announced an end to prisoner exchanges, dealing a blow to the South, which already could not refill its diminishing ranks. The order also inadvertently led to the inhumane treatment of prisoners on both sides, with men suffering from disease and deprivation, and at places such as Georgia’s hellish Andersonville, starvation.

When Grant put his plans into action, the battered and shrinking Army of Northern Virginia was forced to manoeuvre with the wile and fury of a cornered beast. In May, it drew Grant into one of the bloodiest battles of the war: The Wilderness. Two days of chaotic fighting in dense woods saw some men burned alive in forest fires that the battle had ignited. It ended in a draw, with more than 17,000 Union and nearly 8,000 Confederate casualties. Grant did not recoil or regroup as his predecessors would have done, but kept coming. Before the Union attack at Cold Harbor, many of Grant’s men pinned notes on their backs stating, “Here lies the body of.…” The carnage on both sides reached proportions that were horrifying even to war-weary Americans numbed by over three years of staggeringly large casualty lists.

While Grant moved in America, Otto von Bismarck moved in Europe. The ambitious and charismatic Prussian had become ministerpresident in 1862 and immediately began preparing military, diplomatic and economic means to unify Germany. In the spring of 1864, the first of Bismarck’s territorial conquests began with a Prussian-Austrian attack on Denmark. Palmerston recognized the danger that a strong and unified Germany would pose to Britain, but made the tactical error of announcing that his government would stand by Denmark. It did not. Bismarck’s belligerence led to a reassessment of British military preparedness and the realization that the 14,500 troops spread thinly along the American border protecting colonies that seemed unwilling to defend themselves might soon be needed elsewhere. Little Englanders such as Robert Lowe insisted that all British troops be immediately withdrawn from Canada
and the Maritimes to prepare for deployment in Europe.
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Palmerston refused to consider such a drastic action, but the undeniable strength and potential of Grant’s and Bismarck’s forces was altering the way in which Britain saw the world and, in consequence, its view of Canada.

The only ray of hope for Britain was that Louis Napoleon had been successful in his Mexican adventure. French troops had taken Mexico City in June 1863. The bold—or perhaps reckless—move was an affront to America’s Monroe Doctrine, as it re-introduced a European power into the western hemisphere. It was, however, welcomed by Palmerston, who saw it as helping Britain by drawing French troops, money and attention away from Europe, while poking at America’s pride.
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It was from within this cauldron of events, threats and opportunities that Brown rose in the House once again in May 1864 to renew his call for a select committee to investigate constitutional change. The intervening months had chastened Canadian members and this time the resolution quickly passed. Within days, Brown stood in that Quebec City committee room and slid the key into his pocket. Both Macdonalds, Cartier, McGee, Mowat and others were there, and Galt would soon join them. Brown forced them to talk, and talk they did. Eight meetings took place and all the old hatreds, suspicions and hard feelings were put aside. The Civil War and its impending conclusion meant that the colonial leaders could no longer afford to play their old partisan games.

On June 14, the committee reported back to the House. It recommended the creation of a new federal system applied either to a reconfigured Canada East and West or to all British North American provinces. Committee members did not unanimously endorse the recommendation. Of the three who opposed it, the most important was John A. Macdonald, who insisted on a recommendation for a legislative union: one central government with no sub-national provinces.

The committee had done a tremendous service in bringing bipartisan support to the most divisive of issues, but its report was immediately swamped by the very inanities it was designed to address. Later that same day, the government fell—again.

Brown was infuriated, but like Grant, he refused to yield and instead pushed forward. He arranged a meeting with his old rival John A. Macdonald. The two had been political opponents for years, and their professional rivalry had grown to become a personal, visceral hatred. But Brown put those feelings aside and invited Galt and Macdonald for a chat in his room at the St. Louis Hotel.

The next day, Macdonald rose in the House. Everyone expected an announcement of dissolution and yet another election, the fourth in two years. Instead, he elicited gasps from both sides when he stated that a coalition had been formed and that Brown would be joining his government with the goal of bringing about constitutional change from the midst of crisis. Joseph Dufresne, a member from Canada East who had all but given up on Canada, rushed across the floor and hugged Brown around the neck, hanging there ludicrously before dropping to the floor and then jumping up to vigorously pump his hand.

Brown had taken the biggest political gamble of his life for the good of his country. Even the
Toronto Leader
, which seldom missed an opportunity to slam Brown, reported, “Events which occurred today may be pregnant with results of vastly greater importance than perhaps ever befell Canada.”
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The paper was right.

The American Revolution and the country it created were the world’s first and most successful expressions of the broad sweep of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played essential roles in translating those thoughts to the events, needs and documents of their time, thereby providing America’s ideological foundation. The civic humanist and republican ideas of the Enlightenment were sound, and the political structure constructed to reflect them was brilliant.