John A (5 page)

While at school—the length of his tenure there being entirely average—Macdonald received an education that was well above the norm. The schools he attended, first in Kingston and then in Adolphustown, were the typical one-room schools where children of all ages sat at a raised board that ran around three sides of the room and served as their desk. They faced the fourth, open side, where the teacher had a smaller desk. The only other
pieces of furniture were a pail of water and a stove. Most teachers in the region were Scots, each known as a “dominie”—an apt phrase because of the strap they always carried. Books and paper were rare. For most children, this schooling was their entire education. In Ontario, school was not compulsory until 1874—and then for a minimum of only four months a year—a rule that was regularly ignored by farmers' sons.

Macdonald mostly had a grand time at school. Boys liked him because he could tell stories and knew tricks, and because he wasn't afraid of the masters. They also had a wary respect for his Scottish temper. Girls liked him, even though they teased him as “Ugly John”—as he most certainly was, with his absurdly crinkly hair and outsized nose. But they would have noted with approval, certainly with interest, that he was a bit of a dandy, with a taste in gaudy waistcoats. Wit more than compensated for his lack of looks. At one dance, Macdonald forgot he was due to partner a particular girl in a quadrille. She rejected his abject apologies until he flung himself at her feet, proclaiming manically, “Remember, oh remember, the fascination of the turkey.” With her uncontrollable laughter came forgiveness. He did all the customary boyish things, getting into scrapes and, at the age of thirteen, writing florid poetry to a pretty cousin. Although he seldom took part in sports, he was good at running barefoot, at skating and at dancing. Early on, he showed some skill at mathematics, an unusual accuracy in spelling and an insatiable appetite for reading.

Two factors pushed Macdonald onto a life's arc different from that of most of his fellow students: he was a Scot, and he had a mother who was determined that he would be more than an ordinary man.

After a couple of years of making the long daily walk to the school in Adolphustown, John was sent by his parents to Kingston to attend the Midland District Grammar School. It was
run by a graduate of Oxford University, the Reverend John Wilson. Annual tuition fees were seventy pounds, representing a steep sacrifice for the family. Here, Macdonald learned Latin and French as well as English and mathematics. (His French grammar book, dated May 28, 1825, still survives.) He stayed with the Macphersons, where he was thoroughly petted and spoiled. Years later, his nephew, John Pennington Macpherson, recalled in a slight biography of his famous relative how Macdonald would read compulsively, quite untroubled by the noisy antics and quarrels of the large family around him. In the summers he went back to the Bay of Quinte area—to Glenora, where his father had moved to run a grist mill. It, again, soon failed.
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In 1829, the fourteen-year-old Macdonald moved to a new establishment for “general and classical education” run by a recent newcomer, the Reverend John Cruickshank. There were some twenty pupils, from six to sixteen years old; among them was Oliver Mowat, later a Father of Confederation along with Macdonald and later still premier of Ontario. The school's standards were high, the local Scots having decided that the Midland District School was inadequate to give their children a quick start in life. What really set this grammar school apart was that it was coeducational, one of the first in Upper Canada. At the risk of reading too much into it, Macdonald's coeducational experience, reinforced by the female-centred household he grew up in, may explain one of the qualities that set him apart from most men of his day—and of a good many still. In the company of women, Macdonald was always wholly at his ease. He was never awkward or shy or predatory with them. He could flirt and play the gallant, but he never patronized women.

As is common enough, Macdonald was his own principal teacher. He read omnivorously—history, biographies, politics, poetry, geography. His most remarked-upon scholastic skill was his handwriting—clear, large, even and fluid. (His letters would be a delight to later scholars.) Cruickshank was always proud to show Macdonald's compositions to new students, and he kept them for years afterwards as models of penmanship.

Macdonald's preparation for life ended in his fifteenth year. From then on, he began to live it. But he'd already learned a great deal about life's essence—the ways and the whys of how people behave.

 

THREE

The Right Time to Be a Scot

A man's a man for a' that. Robert Burns

J
ohn A. Macdonald placed his first foot on life's ladder by apprenticing to an established Kingston lawyer. To qualify for this post, he had first to go to Toronto, to the offices of the Law Society of Upper Canada, and, before a panel of benchers, sit an exam that involved some Latin and some mathematics. He passed, paid the fee of fifteen pounds, and returned to Kingston as he had come, by steamboat. There was then no formal training for lawyers or any law degree. Now just short of sixteen, he worked long days as a law clerk, running errands and putting newly written letters through a letter press to squeeze out copies on onion-skin paper before the ink was dry; at night he crammed through textbooks.

To become a clerk to an established lawyer constituted a substantial step forward. The one taken by Macdonald was more like a leap. No matter how junior his post, he had gained entry to what was probably the most sought-after legal premises in Kingston—the office of George Mackenzie. Although only
thirty-five, Mackenzie was already one of the town's most successful and highly regarded lawyers.

The crucial introduction to Mackenzie had come to Macdonald as a gift from the family's patron, Colonel Macpherson. Mackenzie would also have been well aware of the quality of the education his clerk had received at Reverend Cruickshank's school. A couple of years later, Macdonald's budding legal career benefited from his being asked by another relative, Lowther Macpherson, to fill in temporarily, with Mackenzie's permission, in his Prince Edward County law office while he himself was away trying to recover from an illness; Macdonald thereby gained management experience at the earliest age. While in Kingston, he made his first adult friendships, most particularly with a bright and attractive young man called Charles Stuart. The preceptor of St. Andrew's Church there took a liking to Macdonald and, while teasing him as “a free thinker of the worst kind,” engaged him in biblical discussions that gave the young law clerk valuable practice in how best to organize his arguments. Moreover, around this time, Hugh Macdonald was rescued from his uninterrupted business failures by a relative, Francis Harper, who slipped him into a secure if lowly sinecure post as a clerk in Kingston's newly established Commercial Bank of the Midland District.

To all these individuals who enabled Macdonald to make his first career steps a good deal more quickly than he would have otherwise, and to others like them who later provided similar assistance as his trot quickened into a canter, there was one obvious and defining characteristic. Each of them was a Scot. Had Macdonald not been a Scot himself, he wouldn't have moved up nearly as fast. His own talents mattered a great deal, of course. But it mattered critically that other Scots were prepared to help him because he was one of their own; it mattered as much that they themselves were doing well enough to be able to provide real
help. Before Macdonald's ascent is tracked, it's necessary first to place him in the context within which he operated. As he moved upwards, he did so as a member of a distinct and uncommonly successful ethnic group.

Macdonald came by his Scottishness through his parents, of course. The benefits of this gift to him were multiplied many times over by another happenstance—one of timing. Macdonald was a Scot when it was the best time in history to be a Scot.

Early in the nineteenth century, the Scots exploded outwards from a small, poor, backward society to become, collectively, one of the most admired and respected of all societies of the day; more remarkable yet, a great many of them had gone on to become the first “citizens of the world.” Through the greater part of the century, Scots accomplished more in more places around the globe than did any other people. Nowhere was this more true than in British North America, the country to which Macdonald's parents had just brought him.

Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, Scots were regarded generally as rude and crude at best, and at worst as outright savages. They were brave, of course, with the special allure of a fiercely proud, freedom-loving people, but backward, self-enclosed, impossible to comprehend. (Indeed, they were not dissimilar to the Métis of the prairies, with whom Macdonald would later so tragically find it difficult to come to terms.) The Scots all knew how to eat porridge properly (standing up, with salt) and how to position exactly the
skein dhu
dagger (in the stocking, just below a kilt-clad knee). Suddenly, before the eighteenth century ended, all this parochialism was replaced by intellectualism and internationalism. Of the transformation, Voltaire would declare,
“It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.”

In a transformation that has few national equivalents, a poor, quasi-feudal society turned almost overnight into a society of ideas and creative energy. The catalyst of change was the Scottish Enlightenment, which, during the period from 1740 to 1790, made the small capital of Edinburgh into an intellectual and cultural rival of any other city of the time, only London and Paris excepted. The two superstars of the Scottish Enlightenment were David Hume, the first modern philosopher, and Adam Smith, the first modern economist. At the time, a cluster of others were as well regarded as these two, among them Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, William Reid and William Robertson.

This extraordinary story has been told lovingly and adroitly by Arthur Herman in his book
How the Scots Invented the World,
subtitled, with only a slight exaggeration,
The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Country Created Our World and Everything in It.
Herman's thesis is that Edinburgh attained “a self-consciously modern view” that is now “so deeply rooted in the assumptions and institutions that govern our lives that we often miss its significance, not to mention its origins.” In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of “deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one's own heritage and oneself with it.”

Those Scots were grappling with some of the most intractable of challenges of our own time, such as how to exploit the benefits of capitalism without destroying society's ethical framework, and how to balance the aspirations of the individual against the needs of the collectivity. Hutcheson decreed that
society's ultimate purpose was “the greatest good of the greatest number.” In
The Wealth of Nations,
Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the “benevolence” of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists.
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Hume decreed that “Liberty is the perfection of society,” but believed equally that “authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom's] very existence.” Two observations by Ferguson could have been minted as mantras for Macdonald: “Man is born in society and there he remains” and, even more so, “No government is copied from a plan: the secrets of government are locked up in human nature.”

These Scots were all progressive conservatives. They believed in natural democracy and in meritocracy, and because they were intensely practical men they believed in education. A 1694 law decreed that each parish in Scotland had to have its own school; England wouldn't catch up until the end of the nineteenth century. Scots' churches (except for the Catholic ones) elected their own pastors. Yet the people were skeptical about the fashionable new doctrine of political democracy—and they were outright hostile to revolution. More than a fifth of the Loyalists, for example, were Scots, among them Flora Macdonald, the Scottish heroine who hid Prince Charles from the English soldiers after his defeat at Culloden, and who eventually made her way back to the Isle of Skye by way of Nova Scotia. A cause for this skepticism was their
disbelief in the perfectibility of human nature. Ferguson warned, “The individual considers his community only so far as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement and profit.” Common sense was their golden rule, not least in the Philosophy of Common Sense, which would play such a part in the development of higher education in Canada.

These enlightened Scots most certainly believed in progress, including technological progress. James Watt developed the steam engine, for example, and John McAdam, hard-surfaced roads. They also believed in the ability of a society to improve itself; otherwise, all that education and that unleashing of enlightened self-interest would be in vain. Yet they were very conservative. As Lord Kames put it, “Without property, labour and industry were in vain.”

The Scottish Enlightenment had run its course before Macdonald was born, and as a young child he moved thousands of miles away from Scotland. Yet in Kingston most of his teachers were Scots. His mother's love of reading, which he inherited and which was so rare among his peers in those early years in Canada, came directly from the respect for knowledge that the Enlightenment implanted in all Scots. All kinds of echoes of the ideas initiated in Edinburgh can be found in Macdonald's own thinking—his disbelief in the possibility of human progress, his belief in the possibility of causing a society to progress (why else throw a railway across a wilderness?), his indifference to political democracy and yet his inherently democratic nature, as you'd expect for someone coming from a society whose national poet laureate had proclaimed “A man's a man for a' that.” No less so, Macdonald would have accepted Robbie Burns's skepticism, so quintessentially Scottish: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promised joy.” Macdonald wasn't a
product of the Scottish Enlightenment, but he was, because of it, an enlightened man.

Macdonald's most direct debt to the Scottish Enlightenment was cultural. The Scots who produced all those ideas weren't solitary geniuses sharpening quill pens in attics. They thought collectively, amid company, and over dinners that ended with lots of broken crockery, or in pubs and taverns amid arguing and shouting and brawling. Even the brainiest among them put on no airs, nor suffered any in others. Their interest in ideas was how to get things done, not to talk about what should and might be done. As them, so Macdonald.

Benjamin Disraeli once remarked that although he had been in many countries, “I have never been in one without finding a Scotchman, and I never found a Scotchman who was not at the head of the poll”—that's to say, on top. This outwardness was one of the most remarkable after-effects of the Scottish Enlightenment. Commonly, minorities react to defeat and occupation by turning in on themselves; the Scots, a century after Culloden, burst out all over the world. The men from the Orkneys joined the Hudson's Bay Company—the joke went—to get warm. Their sheer hardiness as northerners, their conversion to modernity ahead of everyone else, and the excellence of their education (out of a population of 1.4 million at home, twenty thousand people earned their living through writing and publishing) gave them a confidence, a resilience and a distinctive sense of self. So did two other factors. The Enlightenment had changed everyone's image of the Scots. Any society that could produce a David Hume and an Adam Smith could not be a society of barbarians. Their reputation now went before them and opened doors to them.

In their own separate ways, a monarch and a novelist presented a second gift to the Scots. Early in the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria and Sir Walter Scott rediscovered the romance of
the Highlands, or, more accurately, invented it. In truth, the Highlands were a brutal place; the standard of living there was lower than that of the Plains Indians of North America. But just as the film
Braveheart
was irresistible, so were Scott's novels and the tartans that Victoria made everyone wear at Balmoral. One of Macdonald's distinguishing characteristics among nineteenth-century Canadians was that, whenever he went to London and moved among “the greats” (whether by office or by birth), he held his own dignity. He never exhibited the least sign of “colonial cringe” or felt any need to apologize for being a colonial.