John A (26 page)

Eliza Grimason, owner of the tavern in Kingston that Macdonald frequented. Rumours of a relationship between them were almost certainly untrue, but, even though they were from totally different social backgrounds, they were lifelong close friends.

Under her management, Grimason House became the most popular place in the town. It also became Macdonald's unofficial
campaign headquarters. In one description, admittedly from the suspect source of James Roy, it was “the shrine of John A.'s worshippers with Mrs. Grimason as high priestess.” The place was crowded, raucous, rowdy and raunchy. Macdonald went there regularly, bantering with the customers (mostly Conservatives), watching the cockfights (though not himself betting on them) and drinking a great deal. Election nights were his night. Eliza Grimason reportedly controlled one hundred votes, and she made her van available to take Conservatives to the polls, held “open house” for workers and voters and contributed to his campaign funds. According to Macdonald's early biographer Biggar, “when the returns were brought in, she would appear at Sir John's committee room, and walk up among the men to the head of the tables, and, giving Sir John a kiss, retire without saying a word.” On the one occasion he lost, she was devastated. “There's not a man like him in the livin' earth,” she said.

Many years later, Eliza Grimason came to Ottawa as Macdonald's guest at the opening of Parliament. He toured her round the buildings. Then she went to Earnscliffe to have tea with Lady Macdonald, whom Eliza judged “a very plain woman” but doing the job that needed to be done, because “she takes very good care of him.” It's just not credible that Macdonald would have taken a former mistress around Parliament and then handed her on to have tea with his wife. The kiss she gave him in his committee rooms after he won each election must have been innocent, or the half-tipsy Conservative ward-heelers would have been shocked and, incomparably worse, they would have talked.

Macdonald's character, though, gave his friendship with Eliza Grimason a dimension that was far less common and far more interesting than any illicit relationship between them would have been. Their friendship was an extraordinarily democratic one. Macdonald, the nation's most powerful man, and a highly intelli
gent and well-read one to boot, was the true friend of a rough countrywoman who earned her living running a grungy tavern. Their friendship was so close, and so unaffected, that Macdonald in later years kept a framed photograph of Mrs. Grimason on his desk, beside one of his mother. It was because Macdonald knew people like Mrs. Grimason and her customers that he knew Canada better than any succeeding premier or prime minister ever did.

Maybe, post-Isabella, Macdonald could not allow himself to be close to another woman. One chronicler, the historian Keith Johnson, has written that Macdonald seemed to have a “central, emotional dead spot.” That's too strong an assessment; all his life he could be extraordinarily tender with children and wholly at ease with them. But except for Isabella during their first few years together, he never again really let down his guard with a woman.

Here, as always with Macdonald, there is a glaring contradiction—although perhaps only an apparent one. Women adored him. That was the judgment of that sophisticated observer Sir John Willison, the editor of the
Globe,
who wrote in his
Reminiscences
that “because women know men better than they know themselves and better than men ever suspect, there was among women a passionate devotion to Sir John A. Macdonald such as no other political leader in Canada has inspired.” (Since Willison was a confidante of Laurier, this was high praise indeed.) Willison ends, with the gallant flourish, “No man of ignoble quality ever commands the devotion of women.”

One other aspect of Macdonald's relations with women deserves some attention, if cautiously so. In an essay on Macdonald in the 1967–68 edition of the
Dalhousie Review,
the historian Peter Waite first remarks that “his liking for human beings was genuine” and then goes on to make the intriguing comment,
“It is not too much to say that he often liked men as much for their bad qualities as for their good.” A readiness to like people for their faults, or at least an acceptance that such failings are an integral part of the human condition, is more a female trait than a male one. In his own person, Macdonald was thoroughly masculine: he drank a lot, told bawdy stories, had a nasty temper and was highly competitive. But there was also a female side to his nature—an aspect of him caught by the novelist Hugh MacLennan's comment quoted in the introduction, “This utterly masculine man with so much woman in him.” Whatever his own nature, he took people as they came and worked with their faults and shortcomings, rather than trying to reform them or to improve them. As well, the failings of human beings provided him with invaluable raw material for the endless anecdotes by which he gently tugged self-doubting opponents into his web.

Whatever his qualities, Macdonald, during the years on either side of 1860, succeeded neither with women nor with sectarianism. Perhaps he did win one signal victory over the latter challenge, though proof is impossible. A fascinating document exists that captures the essence of the policy of compromise and accommodation that Macdonald deployed to try to resolve the deeply divisive issue of sectarianism that so disfigured Canadian politics through the 1850s and early 1860s.

In a long dispatch to the colonial secretary in June 1857, the governor general, Sir Edmund Head, wrote, “If it is difficult for any statesman to stem their [sic] way amid the mingled interests and conflicting opinions of Catholic and Protestant, Upper and Lower Canadian, French and English, Scotch and Irish, constantly crossing and thwarting one another, it is probably to the
action of these very cross interests and these conflicting opinions that the whole united province will, under providence, in the end owe its liberal policy and its final success.” Head added, “In such circumstances, constitutional and parliamentary government cannot be carried on except by a vigilant and careful attention to the reasonable demands of all races and all religious interests.”

To that analysis of Canada's essential nature, there was not a word Macdonald would have wanted to add. He may indeed have helped to compose many of them. He and Head had several long, private conversations when the government was located in Toronto. Pope wrote in his biography that Macdonald was “never so intimate with any Governor-General as with Sir Edmund.” Moreover, the governor general needed to learn from Macdonald; when he first arrived in 1855, Head caused an uproar among Canadiens by commenting to an Upper Canadian audience on “the superiority of the race from which most of you have sprung.”

If Head learned from Macdonald, the reverse was not true. In another dispatch home in 1858, Head suggested a federation of all the British American colonies. To Macdonald, such an idea was but an intellectual abstraction—perhaps nice, but irrelevant because undoable.

By this time Macdonald was well aware that something was fundamentally amiss in Canadian politics and governance. But he still had no idea what to do to cure the malaise. Around him, though, the times had begun to change.

 

FOURTEEN

The Shield of Achilles

I see within the round of that shield, the peaks of the Western mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves. Thomas D'Arcy McGee

T
he change in Canada that most affected Macdonald at the beginning of the 1860s was the size of the country. Not literally, of course. The United Province of Canada remained just as it had always been—an elongated oblong extending from the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to just beyond the western edge of Lake Superior, and encompassing only about half of today's Ontario and Quebec; an oblong, moreover, blocked from the sea except during the near half of the year that the St. Lawrence River was free of ice. Even though it took up an impressive amount of space on any map of the North American continent, it was a strangulated community.

The change in Canada's size was psychic. In the years immediately before 1860 a consciousness began to stir among Canadians that they were occupying the antechamber of a vast empire. They began to realize that their own United Province was only a part of the territory that existed above the forty-ninth parallel. Elsewhere in the immense, intimidating expanse of land there were no fewer than five other British colonies—to the east,
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and almost an unimaginable distance away to the west, the tiny colony of Vancouver Island, clinging to the edge of a second vast ocean. As well, roughly in the continent's middle, there was a small settlement out on the prairies in a place called Red River, which was administered—sort of—by the Hudson's Bay Company. Almost all this land was entirely empty except for Indians. All of it, though, was British.

Macdonald's interest in this additional territory varied from negligible to non-existent. Between sectarianism and the tensions dividing English and French in the United Province and, most immediately challenging of all, the gradual shift of opinion among his own Conservatives in favour of Rep by Pop, he had more than enough to cope with. About the West, as he later described his sentiments, he was “quite willing personally to leave that country a wilderness for the next fifty years.” As for the Maritimes, although there were occasional proposals for a railway to connect quasi-inland Canada to tidewater at the ice-free port of Halifax, the costs would be horrendous, and no bank or financier in London showed the least interest in advancing the capital needed for such a project.

Yet change was happening in people's minds. It was very tentative and not at all well informed. But a shift in self-awareness about Canada's possibilities had begun that would, before many years, cause Macdonald to undertake the single most radical political project of his life.

One catalyst of change can be traced back to Montreal and to the middle of 1857. A new tri-weekly literary journal, the
New Era,
appeared there. As its opening attraction, it published a series of
editorials on the topic “The Future of Canada.” The ideas expressed in these essays were lively and novel. One declared that although Canada possessed the central spine of the St. Lawrence, it lacked the essential “one-ness of political life.” After asking, “Who reads a Canadian book?” and noting that almost no one did, the journal threw out a challenge: “Come, let us construct a national literature for Canada, neither British nor French nor Yankeeish…borrowing from all lands, but asserting its own title.” The journal questioned whether Canadian trade policy should be “unconditionally and absolutely in the hands of the Colonial Secretary” and urged the appointment of a Canadian “representative” in Washington. The solution to the country's general political problems, it declared, had to be “a Federal compact” within which each province would have its own Parliament while “conceding to the federal authority such powers as are necessary for the general progress and safety.” A new federal constitution, though, was not enough: “The federation of feeling must precede the federation of fact.”

What was happening here, as happened so rarely in the pragmatic, provincial world of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politics, was original thought and unleashed imagination. The author was a newly arrived immigrant, Thomas D'Arcy McGee. He possessed, as was even rarer in Canada, the voice of a poet or, since the florid verse he scribbled out was scarcely poetry, then at least the voice of a romantic.

Irish, of course, born in 1825 in County Louth and the son of a coast guard, McGee got involved with the revolutionary Young Ireland movement, fled the island disguised as a priest, and made his way to Boston and later New York, earning his living as a journalist. He proclaimed, among a good many other bravura ideas, that the United States would eventually stretch “from Labrador to Panama” and that “either by purchase, conquest, or
stipulation, Canada must be yielded by Great Britain to this Republic.” Yet McGee grew restive in that country. Its practice of slavery disgusted him, as did, more personally, the anti-Irish bigotry of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement. McGee came north to Montreal in 1857 and to his astonishment found there, after all his years of fighting the English, “far more liberty and tolerance enjoyed by those in Canada than in the U.S.” Besides his capacity for passion, McGee attracted attention by two qualities: he had great charm, and he was exceptionally ugly. He was short, swarthy, with a sort of squashed-up face. His wife, Mary, when asked whether she ever worried he might stray during his many trips away from home, responded, “Sure, I've got great faith in his ugliness.”

Besides his editorials in the
New Era,
McGee developed a set speech that commanded ever-larger audiences. It was a hymn to a wider, bolder Canada: “I see in the not remote distance, one great nationality bound like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of the ocean…I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs but all together by free institutions, free intercourse and free commerce. I see within the round of the shield, the peaks of the Western mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves…I see a generation of industrious, contented moral men, free in name and in fact.” McGee was Canada's first nationalist.

D'Arcy McGee. Passionate, eloquent, hard-drinking, he was Canada's first nationalist, and, effectively, Confederation's poet laureate. His wife expressed her “great faith in his ugliness.”

Nationalism was enough to put him at odds with Macdonald, so suspicious of any innovation that might weaken the British connection. Even more irritating was that McGee, when he got into politics, did so as a Reformer. In the
New Era,
he damned Macdonald's government as “one of expedients, a succession of make-shifts.” McGee took a ministerial post in George Brown's two-day “double-shuffle” government, and afterwards enraged Macdonald by writing articles accusing Governor General Head of having colluded with Macdonald to oust Brown. Macdonald was annoyed enough to declare, “Never did a man throw away a fine career as he [McGee] has by his violence, falsehood & folly.” From their first encounter, though, Macdonald and McGee saw something in each other. After McGee made his maiden speech in the legislature damning Macdonald's “timid, makeshift policy,” Macdonald ambled over, extended his hand and congratulated him. McGee remarked afterwards how “ready and dextrous” the older man was, and how “good humour is his most apparent characteristic.” No doubt that was just Macdonald's “soft sawder.”

Over time, though, their early recognition of a connection between them would blossom into a partnership, both of political allies and of drinking buddies. Perhaps Macdonald saw in McGee, ten years younger, the kind of protege men in power often like to have around to mentor. Perhaps Macdonald responded to the romantic in McGee, aware in his inexhaustibly subtle way that a dreamer is as much a part of public affairs as is a doer. It is tempting to call Macdonald, Cartier and McGee the three musketeers of Confederation, but it would not be true: Cartier never liked McGee, perhaps because, with his quick wit and marvellous singing voice, he was more popular at parties.

With McGee, the idea of Canada as something larger than the sum of its parts entered the public discourse. It was an idea, moreover, that all those who crowded in to hear McGee's speeches
applauded wildly, no matter whether they were Conservatives or Reformers or Grits, or entirely indifferent to all politics.

Another voice addressing itself to the possibility of a wider Canada also began to be expressed at about this same time—from Alexander Tilloch Galt. Its nature was quite different from McGee's, more precise, less flowery, more attuned to accounting than to poetry. But still, it was a voice able to inject credibility and solidity into the vague notion of a wider Canada.

One of Macdonald's most glaring political weaknesses was that, while he had many members in the legislature, the ranks of his ministers were conspicuously thin in the vital ingredient of talent. Galt was an obvious potential new recruit for the cabinet, except that he displayed great wariness about Macdonald. Luring Galt to his side now became Macdonald's principal project.

Born in 1817, just two years after Macdonald, and like him a Scot, Galt was the son of John Galt, a writer who once travelled with Byron through Asia Minor. He was well educated and exceptionally bright. He grew up tall, lean and hardy, once walking thirty-six miles in six hours. His father immigrated to Canada to manage a British-financed scheme for colonization in the area of Sherbrooke in Lower Canada. Galt joined his father, who soon returned to Britain. The young Galt rose quickly in the business: when he was just twenty-six he was sent back to London to become commissioner of the Canadian operations of the British American Land Company. He returned to Sherbrooke, did well and, as was common at the time, went into the legislature, as an Independent.

Once Macdonald had become premier, he was in a position to place an alluring bait in front of Galt. Cannily, he offered nothing at all; instead, he engaged in tantalizing teasing: “You call
yourself a
Rouge.
There may have been at one time a reddish tinge about you, but I could observe it becoming by degrees fainter. In fact you are like Byron's Dying Dolphin, exhibiting a series of colours—‘the last still loveliest'—and that last is ‘true blue,' being the colour I affect,” Macdonald wrote in a letter to Galt in 1857. “So pray do become true blue at once: it is a good standing colour and bears washing.”