John A (4 page)

Yet, as historian Judith Fingard has noted, there was a conspicuous “absence of mass demonstrations and violent crime amongst the poor during the winters of greatest suffering.”
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The poor were kept quiescent by exhaustion, by the bitter cold and, far from least, by a deep and seldom-questioned respect for the law. Macdonald learned all about this real, unromantic, urban Canada while he grew up in Kingston, and from his boyhood stays with his roving family in nearby Prince Edward County he gained an understanding of rural Canada as well.

Kingston was actually better off than other towns in Upper Canada. An 1837 guide for emigrants called it “perhaps the finest-built town in the Province,” while T.R. Preston, an English visitor at around the same time, said it “resembled an English village but somewhat stragglingly built, though it possessed in its substantial parts some very substantial homes.” Kingston possessed
one invaluable urban asset: lots of limestone. When the Macdonalds arrived, most houses were constructed of logs or hewn lumber—a motley array of dwellings often destroyed by fire. With the completion of the Rideau Canal, though, a lot of Scottish stonemasons were suddenly looking for work, and by the 1840s Kingston had begun to acquire more substantial buildings made of the local stone.
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A few of the leading citizens commissioned remarkable houses in the delicate Adamesque style and began to install beautiful mouldings and chimney pieces in their mansions. Some major public buildings, far grander than the small town itself, were constructed during these years—a hospital, a penitentiary, a lunatic asylum, a courthouse and, later, a superb town hall. Kingston even became important enough for a stagecoach to make a twice-weekly trip between it and Montreal—a bone-shattering experience, for sure, but with the benefit that, unlike in England, highwaymen were rare.

The Kingston of Macdonald's day even encompassed some of the finer things of life. It had a lending library and two newspapers. Occasionally, travelling theatre groups performed for a night or two, and in the churches there were organ recitals and, on Sundays, sonorous, scary sermons. Band concerts were particularly popular, and for the active, so were cricket matches, fox hunts and horse races—all made possible by the military garrison stationed in the town. The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.

The most intense competition in Kingston revolved around
the sexes, as Dickens would have noted had he lingered. The highest ambition of the wives of successful merchants and farmers was to marry off a daughter to a bachelor English officer. Few fulfilled this aspiration, because, in the cruel comment of one witness, they all “still smelt of bread and butter.” Nevertheless, the young officers praised the way Kingston chaperones were less watchful than those back in England.

The underside of life flourished here too. One visitor described the streets as “swarming with drunkards and prostitutes”—the inevitable consequence of so many soldiers and sailors and immigrants passing through. Kingston's Common Council, or town council, reported in 1841 that there was a drink shop for every seven or eight men, ranging from taverns or pubs to “low dram shops” or shebeens. In counterpoint, a local temperance society was started up; it suggested, among other things, the installation of a treadmill as the best way to deal with drunkenness and better “the morals of the lower classes.”

If Kingston was in many ways a brutal society, so at the time was all of British North America and, indeed, just about the entire world. Drunken soldiers and sailors were easy marks for muggers. Soldiers often deserted across the nearby American border; those caught were flogged at a triangular wooden frame, to the beat of a drum. Punishments everywhere were brutal: inmates in the penitentiary in Kingston included a child of eight who began his three-year sentence with a flogging by the cat; another inmate, ten years old, received 102 strokes of rawhide. Hangings were a public attraction—one steamer brought in two hundred “tourists,” including children, to watch an execution. A man was hanged for stealing a cow.

After three months of living jammed up in the Macpherson home, Hugh Macdonald moved his family out on its own. He opened a store in the centre of town, and the six of them lived in the rooms above. Besides a mix of foodstuffs and hardware, he offered customers “groceries, wines, brandy, shrub [a cordial], vinegar, powder and shot, English window-glass and putty, etc.” The enterprise failed quickly. Hugh opened another general store in another location. It soon failed too.

Amid these setbacks, the family had to come to terms with an almost unimaginable trauma: the second son, James, was killed at the age of five and a half by a family servant named Kennedy. It's impossible to be certain what happened. One day, Hugh and Helen went out, leaving John A. and James at home in Kennedy's care. The servant was a secret drinker. In one account, Kennedy got angry with James for crying for his parents and lashed out at him with a stick. In another, he lunged drunkenly at him and James slipped, hitting his head on an andiron. Whatever the cause, the young boy died while seven-year-old John A. witnessed his murder or manslaughter. The May 3 issue of the Kingston
Chronicle
in 1822 carried this sad obituary: “On Monday the 22 ult., James, second son of Mr. Hugh Macdonald, Merchant of this town, aged five years and six months.”

Hugh Macdonald's ad in the Kingston Chronicle of July 3, 1821, showed, for him, a rare business sense as the only one in the paper to carry an illustration of his wares.

That newspaper notice was the family's entire recorded response. No charge was ever brought against Kennedy. Hugh entered no record of the death in his memorandum book of family events, though John A. later added it to the chronology. No
burial place for the boy has ever been identified; he is not listed among those interred in the family plot at Cataraqui Cemetery.
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Nor is there any reference to the tragedy in any of the family letters that have been preserved. At the time, the most common reference likely to be mentioned in family correspondence would have been to a locket or brooch containing a circle of the lost child's hair, commonly worn for years afterwards by a bereaved mother. Yet no surviving letter contains any mention of such a commemorative object.

This silent reaction can be attributed far more readily to acceptance than to callousness. Then, death was part of life, and as any stroll through any old cemetery will confirm, to be young then was to be close to death. A survey done in Montreal in 1867 found that two out of every five children never reached the age of five. As well, grief may have been generally subdued because it amounted to an expression of doubt about the existence of an afterlife. Religion provided healing; a loved one who had died was often referred to as one who “went before”—to a place where the others would later join the departed.

The single certain consequence of this tragedy was that, henceforth, the Macdonald family's entire hopes rested on the shoulders of John Alexander—the last surviving male heir among the original three.

After his second enterprise in Kingston had failed, Hugh decided to change his location entirely. In 1824, four years after their
arrival, he moved the family out to Hay Bay, on the lakeshore to the west of Kingston, where he opened yet another store. Young John, by now nine years old, continued with his schooling in the nearby village of Adolphustown.

Each day he walked three miles to school and, in the late afternoon, three miles back. This commute was entirely ordinary. His sisters, Margaret and Louisa, made the same walk with him. The three of them played well together, often as soldiers in a game where he was always the officer, and they got into the usual scrapes. As the only boy now, and anyway his mother's favourite, John was spoiled rotten. Margaret, small and delicate, possessed an aptitude for seeming vulnerable. Louisa, by contrast, was tall, with a stern face and a long, thick nose. At best she could be called plain; in later years she protested that someone had compared her to her brother, “the ugliest man in Canada.” Independent and stubborn like her mother, she was John A.'s pal.

One of the most surprising comments Macdonald ever made was to his confidential secretary and biographer, Joseph Pope: “I never had a boyhood. From fifteen I began to earn my living.” It is Macdonald's rare lapse into unguarded bitterness that makes this admission so surprising. More astounding still, his complaint was quite untrue. Macdonald did indeed have to quit school at the age of fifteen, when he began his legal career, but this pattern was almost universal then. The phenomenon of adolescence had yet to be discovered (or invented); a survey done in 1871 found that one in four boys aged eleven to fifteen were working in some kind of a job. Typically for the times, Egerton Ryerson, the great Canadian educator, espoused the proposition that children were small men in need of greater instruction than older siblings. In
any case, Macdonald's boyhood was more agreeable than that of most boys. At home, he experienced no shortage of love, and he benefited from the kindliness of an extended family. While the family was pinched for money, that was not in the least unusual, and of little concern to a boy.

The explanation for Macdonald's bitterness may reside in another comment he made to Pope. “If I had had a university education,” he reflected, “I should probably have entered the path of literature and acquired distinction therein.” Looking back from a time near the end of his life, Macdonald may have been expressing an uneasy sense that politics hadn't stretched his intellect enough and that he had missed out on opportunities to express the creative and imaginative side of his character.
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Perhaps he was thinking enviously of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, his ideological and physical look-alike, who, amid the grinding pressures of politics, had found time to write no fewer than twenty novels,
Tancred
and
Endymion
the best received among them.
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